Mark Sisson

Lewis: Episode number 827 with NYT best-selling author Mark Sisson. Welcome to the school of greatness my name is Lewis Howes a former athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today, now let the class begin.

Albert Einstein said “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

Welcome to this episode with Mark Sisson, building a $200 million personal brand. So excited about this interview because I’ve known Mark for a long time and it’s been amazing to watch him continue to change and not get stuck or set in one way.

If you don’t know who he is he is the author of many best-selling books, an entrepreneur and founder of primal kitchen and primal nutrition. His best-selling book the primal blueprint is credited with the turbocharging of growth with primal [?] movement back in 2009.

His book the key to reset a NYT best-seller and reached all-time best-selling all books on Amazon.com for 2 days. Additionally he’s written [?] cookbooks, lifestyle books and publisher over at Marksdailyapple.com the number 1 ranked blog for over a decade and it is a health and fitness category.

Mark was a marathoner for a number of years finishing in the top 5 in the 1980 U.S national marathon championships for a qualifying of the 1980 U.S Olympic trials.

In this interview we talked about how arriving at your superpower takes time. Now, Mark didn’t find the superpower early on, he’s been a seasoned entrepreneur for a long time and has continue to lead change and adapt and find a superpower.

Talked about the importance of pivoting in life, how you cannot build a brand without authenticity. Why always creating is a key to success and the lesson Mark has learned from his varying jobs and how they have led him to build one of the biggest fitness movement in history.

It’s also really cool we talked about how to build a personal brand and make it something that can exit 200 million plus dollars with just your personal brand. Starting from a blog to 200 million dollar exit.

Our sponsor today is Peloton. Now, I just went into the Peloton showroom here in Los Angeles and I was just blown away. They’ve got this new treadmill that is incredible that I want to get right then. They’ve got their Peloton bikes with [?] and thousands on demand are waiting for you to take.

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A big thank you to our sponsor lending club. Now, I know life is crazy and there’s never enough time there’s too many things to keep track off and sometimes it’s pretty hard to juggle all the bills and make sure you pay more than the minimum on your credit cards. 

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 And the summit of greatness is upon us in less than 2 months. 1 of the most inspirational event of the year is happening in Columbus, Ohio. This is our 4th annual event summit of greatness.

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A big thank you to our sponsors and I am super excited about this interview with the one and only Mark Sisson.

Lewis: Welcome everyone back to the school of greatness podcast we’ve got Mark Sisson in the house.

Mark: Thanks for having me.

Lewis: You’ve been in the fitness and nutrition space for over 30+years?

Mark: Yeah.

Lewis: 30+ years originally teaching people about health and nutrition. You wrote a book and tons of books, you’ve got coaching, courses, and supplements and then when you hit 61 something changed?

Mark: I think in retrospect was the natural order of things it was natural evolution, but I started out first of all I started out as an entrepreneur in my youth and I was always an entrepreneur. And in my 40’s I decided to go with supplements, so I decided making a line of supplements that was quite successful for a while.

Lewis: 40? 

Mark: I tell my kids I was 47 when I finally decided what I wanted to be when I grow up. So, I start this line of supplements and it’s doing really well and it was based on a model that was using television, my appearances of television sort of expert driving traffic. We talked about exercise and diet and fitness and all the things that I know about, and by the way these awesome supplements right here very low key sales approach but it was quite effective and successful.

Lewis: Sure.

Mark: A few years into this strategy the model just dried up. So, I thought ‘what am I gonna do to resurrect my business?’ All of a sudden you know the television model of infomercials and sales based on TV ceased to work, they were 300 cable channels and the internet was starting to become a thing. Fewer and fewer people were picking up the phone and call now.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: So, I shifted in that first year I realize that things were going south and do my own TV show, because I was buying time on other people’s shows.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: I produce and direct my own shows.

Lewis: What year is this?

Mark: 2005. So, 2005 I did a TV show called ‘responsible health’ and I shot 52 half hour episodes and each one unique confident female co-host. I had 3 guest every show that are experts and I tried to use the advertising breaks to sell my products.

Lewis: So it’s free content and then selling something.

Mark: Exactly. At the end of several months of doing this I lost a million and a half bucks and I thought ‘I better pull back.’ So, I started my blog in 2006 based on that failed experiment on television knowing that I was good at creating content, I could produce this content on exercise and nutrition and health and everything people want to know about, and I had a unique sort of perspective. So, I started Marksdailyapple.com in 2006. Over the years the topics became more and more about food and about diet and less and less about the other tangential peripheral aspects of performance. So as I am writing more and more about food and posting recipes and cookbooks I realize I am talking about food, and I am writing about food and focus on food. And what I am focused on most is the concept of clean eating, of having getting rid of sugar and refined carbohydrates.

Lewis: Right.

Mark: And just incorporating fats and clean source of protein and minimal sugar and carbs. But when you distill that list down it is not a lot of food. So, what makes the difference is how you prepare it.

Lewis: The sauces.

Mark: So, I thought there’s an opportunity because no one company is making like a great mayonnaise or ketchup or a great salad dressing.

Lewis: And that’s why you just started making them from scratch on your own?

Mark: Yeah, I’ve been making them from scratch for 20 years because I didn’t trust anything that I can find in the store. So, that’s always been my thing. 

Lewis: Right.

Mark: So, I put together R and D team and we spent a year looking at different iteration of mayonnaise and ketchup and salad dressings and barbecue sauces. The first we came up with that commercially can scale was this mayonnaise. You know I started in that company when I was 61 years old, so we launch our first product in 2015 and it took off.

Lewis: But when did you start doing supplements? 47?

Mark: Yeah I was 47 years old and it was in 95 I think.

Lewis: Before that you were an entrepreneur doing different things.

Mark: So there’s a gap there. I mean I worked 40 hours a week when I was 12 years old in the summers mowing lawns, I had a regular 5 day a week 8 hour lawn mowing job.

Lewis: Wow.

Mark: When I was 14, 15 and 16 I worked double shifts at a restaurant in the summer. When I was 16 through 27 I put myself through college painting houses and it was such a good job and that’s during the phase when I was a semi-pro athlete.

Lewis: You did not make any money running.

Mark: Was not making any money running and I race around the world and I wanted to travel and compete in those races at the highest level. 

Lewis: Was this a triathlon?

Mark: At first it was just in my marathon days.

Lewis: What was your best time?

Mark: 218. Qualify for the Olympic trials. And then I went into triathlon but then like I started a frozen yogurt shop in 1981 in Palo Alto. So many lessons in my life I had a business partner and we opened this, we bought a barbershop because we couldn’t find a small enough space to lease in Palo Alto in 81. 

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: We turned it into a frozen yogurt and we crushed it.

Lewis: Really.

Mark: It was huge and we got so I don’t want to say greedy, but I said ‘let’s go for bigger one.’ The name of the place is cool licks.

Lewis: I like it.

Mark: We built a larger one down there and all of a sudden it went from 535 sq.ft you know a place that was doing $400,000 a year gross and generating $175,000 profit. Then we go to an 8000 sq.ft emporium. 1983 17% interest to borrow money in those days, so it was automatically doom. So that was a huge failure on my part.

I walked away from that and came to L.A to be a sports caster. I got a job running the U.S triathlon in Colorado Springs for 3 years. I didn’t want to do non-profit the rest [?], so I got a job as a COO of a large vitamin company in Santa Monica and then start up my own.

Lewis: When did you start to blog?

Mark: In 2006 I started to blog so I was 53.

Lewis: At 53 and it was early in the blogging world.

Mark: I wonder if there’s time to rise above the blogs that I saw out there, now maybe it is too late.

Lewis: Right. It always seem like after you wait 5 to 10 years after blogs that it’s too late but then you see a blog that pops within a year.

Mark: Yeah.

Lewis: So, I think there’s always an angle to grow quickly if you got leverage and doing something different and unique. But you are 50 something when you lost your blog.

Mark: Yeah.

Lewis: 61 you launch the food business and sold the food business at 65?

Mark: Yeah 65.

Lewis: So the cool story you didn’t really figure out what you were doing until 61?

Mark: I think that the ability to pivot and see opportunity is probably the single greatest skill set that an entrepreneur can have, to not be so and I can go back and say ‘that’s a lesson I learned.’

Lewis: Right.

Mark: I had one of the top blogs around, I mean I had 3 unique per month and so you would think that the traffic would generate enough sales in the vitamin world and the supplement business and yet instead of taking a step back [?].

Lewis: Interesting. So, when did you start to listen to your audience and what they want the most?

Mark: I was listening all along but I wasn’t hearing I don’t know what the appropriate terminology is, but the point of which enough people had commented that for instance, how frustrated they were when [?] and it would fail.

Lewis: They will make their own mayonnaise.

Mark: Here’s the recipe and we’d make a video of it and it’s all [?] and everything else and they make it.

Lewis: Clumpy.

Mark: Exactly and they would throw it away. Again, as an entrepreneur you have to always be ready willing and able to get the feedback from your customers.

Lewis: How do you know when it is the right time to pivot? Can you just stop what you are doing with the supplements or should you put all your time in the mayonnaise that I like?

Mark: I had no clue, I did not know the food business.

Lewis: How to do this yeah.

Mark: Another important lesson I’ve learned was I didn’t pivot away from what I was doing I kept making the supplements. So, I wasn’t abandoning that as a bad idea as much as I was adding a new concept in the food space. So, I didn’t start a new company I just added a new line of products to my existing company. So, now I had this one company that was doing quite well and had been doing quite well.

Lewis: Sure.

Mark: I wanted to experiment in this food business and so I started creating products using pretext [?]. So, I would take profits from my supplement business and roll them over to the same product in the same company, rather than take for every dollar I make in supplements if I make 50 cents in taxes, and I then I take the 50 cents out and start a new company I only have 50 cents to start the company with. 

Lewis: reinvest yeah.

Mark: Reinvest it back to the company then I was able to experiment and see if there was a market for these products that I envision being successful.

Lewis: Did you recommend people starting their new brands within their own company?

Mark: I think there’s a good reason for trying that if it’s related for sure. You know I started a coaching business within my primal nutrition business and it stayed within that company.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: It was all within the context of my original company. So, I had the supplements and publishing and they were all in the same company.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: And then when I saw that there was an opportunity to succeed on its own [?], prove in the business model and the concept I scaled enough that I knew take it off and put it to its own platform and company.

Lewis: What were the biggest failures you had in the last 15 years?

Mark: There’s 2 things that come to mind, first of all the publishing which started out great publishing is awesome. So, I couldn’t find a publishing for my original book, again I had traffic a blog and platform

Lewis: Traffic and blog.

Mark: I had warehouse and credit card processing from the supplement business, all that stuff went very well together and it was easy for me to do that and then I found a 3rd party independent distributor who would distribute it to all the books. And this is back when there was still [?]. And I could make you know that was a couple of million dollars a year in sales.

Lewis: Wow.

Mark: I controlled the price and the markets on it and I controlled the distribution and it was fantastic. Publishing has changed.

Lewis: A lot.

Mark: And it’s change from year to year. So, now all of a sudden publishing is not active successful business for me. It’s just a different kind of thing.

Lewis: So you got to shift and pivot that.

Mark: As a publisher that was not my wheelhouse. So, I continue to write books and I worked with harmony books and they’re fantastic and are great, but for me as a business person when that was not my real wheelhouse I took a step back and I need to focus my energy where it is best use in areas that I know.

Lewis: That was the first thing.

Mark: The other thing I started a restaurant chain. We were extremely successful and just didn’t realize that my lack of experience in the restaurant business and some other issues the partners that I was working with. So you can’t always have a success and one of the, you know key things for me for my life and all the failures that I’ve had is that as long as you learn from them and don’t go hugely into debt and ruin the rest of your life, as long as you live your life in real time and enjoy your family or whatever it is you are doing living your life then it doesn’t matter if you have a couple of string of failures, because it only takes one success of some reasonable magnitude to have made all that you did in your life worth having pursued.

Lewis: What do you say to the 25 year olds to feel like they are behind?

Mark: I mean I got socks in my drawer that are 25 years old. 25 and feeling like you haven’t made it yet is got to be a horrible feeling but it’s the whole process of arriving at you know your secret power and secret sauce. If we followed our passion we’d all own ice cream shops.

Lewis: Yeah pizza shops and ice cream shops. 

Mark: It’s more about finding out what you are good at and what you can serve other people and what they would benefit from you having served to them and that takes time for a lot of people. If that takes time to go down a path and commit for sure, but then be okay with an outcome that’s less positive and just move on to the next thing.

My whole life has been about pivots and trying stuff. I started a shoe repair company when I was a runner because I was pissed off that my running shoes would only last for 800 miles less than 8 weeks.

Lewis: Wow.

Mark: You know a bunch of kits and it was horrible idea, well it was a great idea for one product but not enough to start a business.

Lewis: Right.

Mark: I learned from that you might have a great idea but if it’s not a business then it is not worth pursuing. Sometimes you have to be a little bit more realistic about your dreams and creations and ask yourself ‘can this be a million dollar business?’ 

Lewis: How many things did you think were potentially a hundred million dollar businesses?

Mark: I’ve had lot of ideas.

Lewis: You took action on?

Marks: That’s the other thing you need to take action and have some amazing ideas that other people have executed on. I thought at the time it would be an awesome thing and somebody else beat me to that.

TRX is a good example for that it is a multi-hundred million company and it is work out ropes. TRX those guys identified exactly what needed to be done, they marketed brilliantly and put a whole video on it. The whole execution was flawless on what was otherwise a fairly mundane kind of invention.

Lewis: You probably had a vision the supplement business you launched has potential to e hundred million dollar business.

Mark: Yeah. It always has the potential to be a billion dollar business if you do it right, but for whatever reasons I couldn’t get those variables to work for me, part of that I had the vision the types of products I want to make and who I want to serve in the marketplace.

Lewis: Right.

Mark: It was the highest product possible. So, that limited my reach and my potential marketplace.

Lewis: A lead performer is running hundred miles a week.

Mark: It started going after endurance athletes who I felt needed some assistance with their recovery and didn’t want to turn to illegal performance enhancing substance. So, I started with that and it was not a very good business because a lot of athletes are like ‘I work out pretty hard I don’t need this other stuff.’

Lewis: Right.

Mark: When I was on television with these products I found women who are 65 or 68 reading all of the research on anti-aging and reading the reports and the headlines and were focused on anti-aging strategies, and my products addressed that because they were sort of, the name of the product was damage control.

I built a product for one marketplace didn’t work and I pivoted and shifted.

Lewis: When you got into the food and mayonnaise did you think this is a hundred million dollar business?

Mark: I thought it was gonna be a huge business because food is a massive marketplace and massive business in the United States.

Lewis: Right. How did you have the confidence to launch it? How did you shift that late into building something with 70 employees?

Mark: It’s a huge challenge and for me it required me giving up this concept that I was the smartest guy in the room. So, my whole business career I’ve been successful largely based on my own work.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: When I gave that partly because I was entering a space I did not know anything about, I had to hire people from that industry who were not only knowledgeable about the industry but who had bought into the lifestyle and concept that I was [?]. It’s a major stretch to launch a 12 [?] for 9.95

Lewis: How much does each cost?

Mark: At Costco you’d get a bucket for 8 bucks.

Lewis: Really?

Mark: It’s made with horrible ingredients the largest and cheap version you can buy. So, we wanted a demonstrably better category of the products that we.

Lewis: Of all the sauces, dressing.

Mark: We want to be the best demonstrably product. It has to be no artificial ingredients and mostly no sugar and has to taste great.

Lewis: Challenging.

Mark: I am a visionary but you guys execute because I don’t know what I am doing here. When I gave that up and stopped micromanaging it just took of.

Lewis: Really? How did you learn?

Mark: I had to and forced to. At some point age drags a little bit of wisdom along with it and the point I just go, I don’t have the energy to be pulling all-nighter and on the phone second guessing my people. The key is you got to hire the right people.

Lewis: How do you know?

Mark: Like for most entrepreneurs I would say the single most important part of your job is hiring the right people. When you’re an entrepreneur and you have reasonable success you wind managing resources. They then take care of the business of business. So, I think hiring the right people is key and it requires time.

Lewis: Were you wrong in any of them?

Mark: Yes, one early that I thought was the magic that we needed in the marketing department and turned out not to be the case. Highly recommend it very affable [?] just didn’t work out.

Lewis: Didn’t work out yeah.

Mark: From day 1 my partner in this [?] was my first hire she is now the CEO of primal kitchen. You know hire no assholes that was the big criteria in hiring for our company.

Lewis: No assholes?

Mark: We would bounce each hires of each other and once you put the team together and you work well with the team it makes life so much easier.

Lewis: Wow. Now, what advice do you have for people that are building their personal brands and got some influences and content and following?

Mark: Yeah.

Lewis: What suggestions would you have for them over the course of the next 5 or 10 years?

Mark: A lot of variables and criteria. You know authenticity is probably the key in any brand building experience you have to be able backup what you are saying and offering with credibility.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: Brand building is, because you have sort of 2 opportunities in retail and selling people.

Lewis: Just try to create a product and you always have the cheapest price?

Mark: Yeah, so in the space that you and I move in there are lot of influencers who will have their own personal brands. 

Lewis: Consumer beauty products yeah.

Mark: A lot of those commoditize. If you want to compete on price you just gonna get taken by.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: I mean they’ve got a big box of stores and they’ll pay a lot less. So you have to compete on brand and you have to compete specialist in your area and knowledgeable and provide a lot of value added services. I spent my whole life educating people and that’s why my products do so well, people understand what they’re buying. I spent 10 years building a brand with marksdailyapple.com before I launch my first product.

Lewis: Yeah. 

Mark: Before the food came out I had 10 years of brand building experience so that when we launched it I wasn’t just setting a table and giving out samples. I had enough people who were willing to make the leap and buy online in the ship mayo because they couldn’t get it anywhere yet because we hadn’t secured the distribution yet.

Lewis: Right.

Mark: But it was all about the brand and building the authenticity and building the credibility and the loyalty, I think a lot of company do that backwards now. They come up with a product first and then they go ‘okay now we have to start.’ That’s a difficult way to do it.

Lewis: If you didn’t have that 10 years of writing that blog or building that relationship and you just had this idea, how much harder would it be to get to where you are now?

Mark: Infinitely harder. There’s some involvement with people with reach and can get to you know new customers.

Lewis: Right.

Mark: Back to the question ‘what would I advise to somebody building a brand?’ understand what it is that you want to offer. What’s your own personal unique selling prospect? Coaching is tough you know our spaces has thousands of coaches. If you really want to rise above in that world you have to distinguish yourself.

Lewis: What your uniqueness is? Building that authenticity with people. 

Mark: Yeah and in the beauty of the modern world and what we have with social media is 42:53 you can keep your day job and you can be building these circles of towers of influencers and building your network while you are getting ready to launch your product, and I think you can try out new things.

Lewis: Sure.

Mark: Use Instagram as a focus group.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: At the end of the day you can always change your mind.

Lewis: And you change your mind dozens of times to get to where you at?

Mark: Yeah.

Lewis: What was the biggest fear in launching the brand?

Mark: I left a well-paying job with a wife and 2 kids and no money in the bank and no salary to start the supplement company.

Lewis: Wow.

Mark: People would say that was inappropriate but I had a plan lined up some consulting gigs. I knew there was going to be some income while I was building my business.

Lewis: You weren’t making really much money those first few years?

Mark: No, I mean I was making enough to live on. I would not have left my well-paying job had I not had those lined up, but still the intent was to build a line of products.

Lewis: Wow.

Mark: So now it was an opportunity to take another.

Lewis: Take a swing.

Mark: We had some major hiccups business. If you’re an entrepreneur you know business is wickedly high highs and the worst lows. We’d figure out how to make mayonnaise with avocado oil, we sold out first couple of runs and the next 2 runs my co-packer couldn’t make mayonnaise.

Lewis: Really?

Mark: Yeah, 15,000 dollars of raw material that I had to pay for gone. 2 times in a row we couldn’t make mayonnaise, and we finally found the problem it was the pipe.

Lewis: That’s scary.

Mark: Avocado is rare in the world and I wound up buying much avocado oil in the world and having to buy it months out. So to make sure that we can get enough to make the different products I had to pay a premium and store it.

Lewis: How do you make avocado oil?

Mark: It’s a unique process, basically it’s pressed and spun out.

Lewis: Really? That takes time? 

Mark: Yeah.

Lewis: So how much oil can you get from 1 avocado?

Mark: Significant amount. The other thing that we need to know from avocado is the demand for table food is still so high that most growers would much rather sell this table fruit than pressing it.

Lewis: So they can charge a premium for the oil then?

Mark: Yeah. We use organic vinegars from 9[?] it’s a great story and it taste great.

Lewis: What about knock ups? Did other brand see your success?

Mark: Immediately. There was this company not only copied our formula but our basically packaging and everything else.

Lewis: When you come up with a new idea and you launch it and a competitor starts to copy it, how do you defend or just take care of yourself?

Mark: You just rise above it. You just have to forge ahead and not pay attention to what they’re doing other than to maybe identify things that you know that they’re doing and wrong and differently and do better. 

My intention all along was primal kitchen to be billion dollars in sale, I couldn’t do it myself that’s why I sold it. So, the more companies that are doing what we’re doing in food space the more [?] becomes [?]. You wind up making better food available to a large number of people.

Lewis: Same thing with blogging and podcasting.

Mark: Yeah. So my blog started it was 3 million at least and it was probably, I think we got up to 3,400 on Alexa.

Lewis: Huge.

Mark: My traffic isn’t growing anymore it stays steady but I’m fine because there’s 10x more people looking for the information and if they don’t come to my site to get that information then my original mission which was to affect the lives of hundred million people. I get to leverage what I started and maybe claim a little credit for other blogs getting into the space and doing what they do well.

Lewis: Right.

Mark: I know that we are changing the way the world eats, and however we do however we can leverage that. I don’t need to be the one guy who touch a hundred million people, I just want to be responsible for having impacted enough people that it trickle down.

Lewis: When you have the big hit 200 million at age 65 do you think to yourself that this is the biggest success you’ll ever have? Or do you think how can I make this bigger?

Mark: I want to enjoy life now and that’s part of what we talked about earlier, even as an entrepreneur you have to enjoy life.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: The reason we do this is to live life now and to have fun now. So, the advice I give to young people is don’t get yourself into debt, pay the bills. It doesn’t matter today if you make 40,000 a year or 140,000 a year you’re probably not gonna save much. So just invest in yourself. Figure out ways you can always be creating.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: Talk about the mantra that people say ‘always be selling’ but I’m saying always be creating, like always have something in your mind that you’re working towards. Humans by nature that is what separates us from most animals is that we’re creative and that art is a thing that we’ve invented. All these creativity is the outlet that generated commerce and created what we have today. 

Steve Jobs figured out the original computer with Wozniack, it’s just art it is just a form of art making available to other people and you trade your labor to have someone who can play around with that.

Lewis: Right.

Mark: So, when I say creating it is always be thinking of ways in which not to invent stuff. You know journaling, be creative on Instagram you know do all those things that are an expression of who you are and you’ll find out what your superpower is.

Lewis: Do you have a process for creating?

Mark: Freeing up your mind. When I was a runner I would do 15 or 20 mile runs up in the hills.

I do a lot of stand up paddling alone I am out there and all of a sudden, I mean nature my mind is an open book and then something comes in. I didn’t have my mind filled with other crap that I had I just was open to it and have my best creative moments doing that.

Lewis: Powerful. Knowing everything you know now would you change anything?

Mark: I can’t its perfect. You know the heartbreak and the pain and misery it is all perfect. When I started my supplement company I think I was 41 or 42, the 47 number is big in my mind because that’s the year I gave up grains.

Lewis: Really?

Mark: Yeah. So, my main message about eating right and the whole concept behind the primal blueprint emulating sort of ancestral eating pattern and movement pattern, it all came into fruition when I was 47 years old because from 14 to 47 I was miserable.

Lewis: Information.

Mark: G.I pain. I would wake up with horrible gut pain and I couldn’t figure out what it was, when I finally gave up grains it was that easy it just kind of went away. So, that revelation for me that I didn’t have to be miserable all the time that I could actually wake up and feeling what is going on in the world and focus on what I had to focus on was a life changing time for me.

Lewis: Powerful. I love this.

Mark: My point being I wouldn’t change that, because it was such a profound shift for me that it enable me to write the primal blueprint. It became a much more user friendly at accessing health.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: More Universally applicable technology if you will on how to live a healthy life, until that time I was writing about eating well and I was writing about cutting out fats and cutting sugar and all the stuff we wrote about.

Lewis: Right.

Mark: But it wasn’t that I got to that point the whole veil lifted. Now, I understand what my mission in life is and that’s when I tell my kids ‘I didn’t know what I want to be until I was 47.’

Lewis: And also because you suffered so much with that pain you could then realize help a lot of people who are suffering.

Mark: Yeah.

Lewis: Powerful. This is called the 3 truths I think I asked you this last time.

Mark: 3 years ago.

Lewis: Imagine it’s your last day on earth and get to pick the day in the future.

Mark: Yeah.

Lewis: All the anti-aging techniques you figured out.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. 

Lewis: Eating healthy at some point it fades and you got to go and unfortunately you got to take all the information you’ve written about and spoken about you got to take it with you, so no one has access to your content. But you get to leave 3 ideas for the world that would be kind of your guide to humanity, what would you say are your 3 truths?

Mark: You didn’t ask me this last time.

Lewis: Okay.

Mark: I would say ‘diet is huge in accessing health and energy and positive mood.’ Number 2 I would say that ‘everything is perfect there are no looking back on your life, there are no real mistakes because as long as you are willing to learn from anything to get to where you are today everything ultimately winds up perfect and happening at just the right time for you.’ Number 3 and in that same light everything will be okay and that no thought about the future that you have today is benefitting you in any way if you don’t appreciate the moment you are in right now.’

Lewis: I like that one. What are causing anxiety and stress?

Mark: We live our lives either tied to regretting what we did in the past or fearing what’s gonna happen in the future that we miss out on the present.

Lewis: The only thing that matters. What is something we can do to support you?

Mark: So you can still follow marksdailyapple.com I am still writing I think fairly interesting and exploring new avenues at marksdailyapple.com, primalkitchen.com for the food company. You know for me where I am at in my life right now you’re supporting is more a factor of you supporting your people with discontinued great information. 

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: We’re in a tough spot in this country right now, I have a real soft spot in my heart for millennials.

Lewis: Yeah.

Mark: Guys like you are giving guide post along the way that’s what I want to see, I want to see more people involve in other people’s lives with support and encouragement and not putting people down.

Lewis: Right. I love it. Where do you hangout in social media?

Mark: Primal kitchen is in Instagram.

Lewis: Do you hang out there?

Mark: Yeah, I try to edit myself more than I probably should.

Lewis: How old are you right now?

Mark: 46. If you want to be a health coach I mean primal coach institute is where you can find out about this program that basically I took all the information in my head and I uploaded it to this website and you can do what I do in coaching people.

Lewis: To be a coach. You teach people the principles of how to be a health coach like you and then how to get clients as well and run your own business. 

Mark: Yeah.

Lewis: I want to acknowledge you Mark for being an inspiration to people because you continue to pivot and learn and have little success and failure and then little more success and continue to evolve. You are showing us all what is possible at any age and the thing I love about you is you are just getting started now.

Mark: I feel like that. I think that it is my obligation to keep going.

Lewis: My final question is what is your definition of greatness?

Mark: In my world it’s having people better off before you’re having touch their lives.

Lewis: Mark Sisson thanks man.

Thank you for being here I hope you enjoyed this episode, I hope it gave you wisdom, clarity, strategies and everything you need to really help you gain more peace in your heart to optimize your personal brand and know that it is okay to pivot.

Take the link lewishowes.com/827 and post it on social media.

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And George Bernard Shaw said “Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

We’ve got to be willing to adapt and change our thought, change the way we believe about things, change our belief system to see what it is capable for us moving forward.

You must think of something you never thought in order to create something done. It’s time to step up our thoughts, it’s time to be willing to change at all times because the only constant is change. I love you all so very much I hope to see you at summit of greatness as well coming up in less than a month and a half.

I love you all so very much and you know what time it is, it’s time to go out there and do something great.