I'm a 22 Year Overnight Success

I'm writing this article, or more or less a letter in my hotel room in Chicago about to give a speech in the next few hours about life, success, failure, struggle, pain, truth, energy, and the things I was created to speak about here on planet earth from my own personal life.

As I'm writing this I'm not shaking but I feel my nervous system working harder than ever fueling energy into every single cell in my body as if I've entered a different state. Many of you have asked me, Mark who are you? I speak about my story extensively in little snippets on LinkedIn, have featured my full story on my Global Top 100 Podcast Episode 200.

Here goes everything!

$200 & Faith

My story starts before I was born when my parents and sister left their country of Egypt in 1995 as minorities of Coptic Orthodox Christians in a country where most of the state is dominated by Islam. Why? To give me, their unborn child and the rest of our family a better opportunity, a better shot a this life....for someone they didn't even know.

My parents came with $200 in their pocket and a heart full of faith & love. For anyone else who's an immigrant or a first generation migrant, you know the toughness of the immigrant lifestyle. Nonetheless I was born in Boston on July, 22, 1997. My dad literally worked all the time. I would wake up in the morning and see him and then he would be working past the point I'd be asleep. My mom and sister for the majority of my life raised me.

I have nothing but great memories of living a very simple childhood. Enjoying the small miniscule pleasures of life while never thinking there is more to life or how materially poor we really were. I grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts. If you have heard of this town it is infamous for being one of the most dangerous places in the state and where the majority of government housing, section 8, drugs, crime, murder happen. I remember one day my Dad came home once and next thing you know police knock on our door and say, hey your car has been stolen and we found it crashed with a ton of alcohol and cocaine inside.

1st Grade Entrepreneurial Hustle

I remember growing up in school in the first and second grade and having a great time. I had so many kind friends of mine and enjoyed being active, collecting things, and drawing. I have memories of myself in the 1st grade finding random newspapers and going to the sports section and cutting our baseball pictures, taking other newspaper clippings and gluing them together to emulate a real baseball card. I would take my creation and sell it to kids as vintage retro special release editions, make money, and then buy real baseball cards and pokemon cards as well as cookies in the school cafeteria.

I even have a memory of me winning an art competition in the first grade of an ocean I drew with fish and then being able to go on my local television and present my creation. Life was great. Very simple but awesome and filled with great memories with my family & friends.

Looking back at this time, I never considered myself an entrepreneur, I just considered myself somebody who was in an environment that enabled me to be resourceful with what I had and think differently than others.

Small Town Beginnings

After 2nd grade, my family moved out of the city and into a smaller town in rural western massachusetts because my parents got better jobs out there and seized the opportunity.

I remember walking into my first classroom as the new kid at my new school. As I walk through the room, I see many smiling kids, an amazing 3rd grade teacher who helped me a lot but also an extreme physical observation of everyone in that classroom was white / caucasian.

I unconsciously realized throughout the hallways and at the cafeteria almost every single person at my school was white. There were a few other families in the entire town of 5,000 people who also looked physically different like me. I don't want to exaggerate this part of my story because that doesn't do any justice. There were so many kind people to me that tried to help me on my journey, not everybody was out to get me, but some people were.

Growing up I was always an introvert. Somebody who preferred to play by themselves but also hang out with a few close friends. When I joined that new school my introversion went to being extremely shy and over the years developing severe social anxiety.

I'm talking about social anxiety to a point of whenever I would walk into a room my brain would tell me "look down", "you don't look anybody here", "you're never gonna fit in", "find a safe spot in the back of the classroom and don't talk to anybody." Eventually this got to a point where I had just a small number of friends, who I become friends with because they were also considered outsiders and not apart of any groups of circles.

Health Issues

In tandem with these events, I also began to develop many chronic health conditions that many kids today in America face largely classified under autoimmune issues.

I began to develop asthma, issues with my stomach, insomnia, random skin rashes, never being able to focus on anything in my mind or in the outside world, and in turn I was routinely going to the doctors and prescribed various medications and I was told this is something out of your control and this is just the way you are.

As I began to take varying medications, my energy got completely zapped to the point where combined with my social anxiety it created the ultimate prison inside of my own mind where even if I wanted to talk to people my brain didn't let me.

We're Gonna Kill You Sand N*gger Terrorist

As I was growing up. The shock of 9/11 really began to protrude into the culture of america and the fear of middle eastern immigrants. This is where I began to get bullied as a kid. A few times there were physical altercations where on the playground I was shoved to the ground and held down while people insulted me. I remember people would routinely call me a terrorist and I was related to Osama Bin Laden and I'm going to blow up the entire school.

I wish I could say adults and teachers were with me, but they weren't. Many teachers when they heard kids making fun of me either brushed it off or told the kids to leave me alone with a whim. Combined with my social anxiety & health issues this continued to drive me further down the rabbit hole of being in my own bubble with nobody to talk to and shame being built.

I have obviously never done something violent like blowing something up but I began to take on the shame of that not because of what I did, but because of what I looked like, something I couldn't change. This resulted in general anxiety, where now I would try to hide from everybody even my friends and family what I was really going through because fear slowly began to dominate my life.

I have this particular memory of sitting in a classroom and leaving to go to the bathroom. I come back and see written on my binder "we're gonna kill you sand n*gger. Go hang out with Osama Bin Laden." I went to the principal and they launched an investigation and found out who did it and reprimanded but that doesn't erase my psychological trauma.

I remember my anxiety got so bad I also began to develop issues with wetting the bed. I wet the bed almost every single night until I was age 18 when I slowly began to transform myself. But, on the days I didn't wet the bed, I literally couldn't sleep. I would stay up for a full 8 hours and just go to school the next day like a zombie. What I realized was when you go to sleep, you are alone with your mind....there are no distractions...your brain will hit you with everything you have tried to run away from. Fight or flight panic response...wet the bed.

This is what happened in the first chapter of my life. Every single day I would go to war with myself in my own mind and try to hide from the world about everything.

My Escape

I remember I first began to go on the internet when I was 11 years old in 2008.

I remember using the internet to learn about various things on YouTube and random blogs and forums, but nothing particularly useful. I also began to play videogames. Why? Because they projected me into an imaginary world where I could become a different person.

I eventually began to watch YouTube videos about video games so I could get better. A couple years after that I began to make my own youtube videos of me playing video games. At first it was just a recording of the video game, but then eventually I began to commentate over them with a microphone and upload them on YouTube. Long story short, my biggest YouTube channel had 35,000 subscribers in 2011 and I was partnered with Machinima a network that began to pay me pennies for my views on my youtube videos.

I tried out so many little ventures online. YouTube channels, websites, I began to develop mobile apps when the iPhone came out, anything that I could wrap my brain around really. I've started so many little entrepreneurial ventures at this point I've completely lost count.

My Big "Break"

I remember a buddy of mine told me to check out this video game called Minecraft.

We hopped on a multiplayer server and I quickly realized most of those that already existed sucked. Literally the next day I began to google my way through trying to start my own server. Why? Just so I could play with my friends and have fun.

Another long story short, I began to learn, and observe and see what others were doing and improve day by day. My server became the #1 Minecraft Server in the world in 2013, when I was just 15-16 years old. We had 10's of millions of users on our server with 10,000+ premium registered paying members that would pay for microtransactions on the server.

I never had access to any kind of money past $20 in my life. As my server's success grew so did my money supply. Eventually this turned into a 6 figure business making over a hundred thousand dollars from doing something that I loved doing.

At that time I had the unconscious framework of the American Dream in the back of my head because I had never stopped and tried to define success on my own. My definition was go to school, get a degree, get a job, work your way up to a six figure salary eventually and buy a house, get married, get a dog, and all your problems in life go away.

I achieved that at age 16. Guess what? Nothing changed. The story inside my head still told me I was a loser with low self esteem, no confidence and could never do anything. All of a sudden I reached my definition of success fairly quickly and in turn I got more confused, more anxious and more depressed because I reached it but nothing changed.

This slowly began to deteriorate my hope of the world and I turned into a nihilistic know it all who was really just that same 7 year old kid that wanted to love people but couldn't.

College & Cognitive Dissonance

Growing up I had no idea any of this was going on. I didn't know I had anxiety. I was never conscious of anything you just read in this article. But, in college I slowly began to realize many factors in my life and who I really was.

I slowly became conscious of a war that was going inside of my head. Two conflicting ideas. One idea of what I've talked about before of Mark you're a loser and never will amount to anything, another idea saying Wow Mark look at all these cool ventures you've created...you are destined for way more in your future.

At first, when I realized this I tried to run away from it. I tried to escape the responsibility of being who I really am. How did I do that? My drugs of choice were binge eating food, watching Netflix, chugging energy drinks, sleeping all day, not being able to sleep at night. Eventually, I was over 220 lbs, began to socially isolate myself and for the first time in my life began to develop serious depression and seeing the world as a cold grey place.

Eventually, this led me to my own version of rock bottom, where I couldn't fall asleep anymore. The thoughts in my brain were hitting me back to back to back and I couldn't stop them. I began to walk around Boston at midnight to 2am in the worst area of the city...Dorchester where a ton of crime, muggings, stabbings happen.

While I never imagined I would take my own life, I slowly began to fantasize about walking at night and somebody coming up to me and ending my life because I was in so much pain I just wanted to end by any means necessary based on the information I knew.

Turning Point

I remember on one of those nights I was walking. There was utter silence in the streets. No cars, no people, no noise, no distractions. All of a sudden my mind began to enter into a interesting place I had never been for before. I began to hear the real voice that was always inside of me but I was covering up by fear, the opinions of others, etc.

When I began to hear that voice, at first it was unfamiliar, but then it was as if this voice had been trying to talk to me my whole life. I didn't cognitively understand what was happening but I think due to desperation I broke down crying in the middle of the street. I felt like for the first time I felt a force way beyond this physical reality we all see through our eyes.

I felt God had spoken to me for the first time ever in my life with this reassurance of everything is going to be okay. My mind began to throw me back into past experiences of my life and my perspective shifted. I realized the reason why I was in so much pain was because I was looking at the things I had done and my past events and trying to create an identity around those things that had haunted me. When my perspective shifted I realized all of these events did not happen to me, they happened for me to put me in this exact strategically designed divine position in my life to drive me forward and create the future.

I remember I literally ran back home crying the entire time, literally seeing before my eyes this constructed reality in my head fall apart and all of the things I viewed as familiar began to open as big questions.

This Did Not Happen Overnight

I remember the next day, I looked at myself in the mirror. I asked myself "who am I?" Clearly I had no idea who I was because I was just hit with something I had never experience before. This opened my curiosity and the first thing I noticed was my weight of over 220 lbs. I began to actually work towards losing weight which led me on a learning journey of discovering health, nutrition, diet, exercise, sleep and eventually led me every single day to take small steps towards my future and picking up new habits like meditation, journaling, reading, spending time with the right people, etc.

I could keep writing this article forever, and trust me I'm working on a book right now about social anxiety, mental health and transformation. But, I just began to slowly shift my behavior. I remember in April of 2017, when I was on this mission for over a year of taking charge of my own mental health every single day...something crazy happened.

I was with a friend of mine, and I stepped outside and all of a sudden the sun flashed in my eyes. I looked up and saw a beautiful tree with leaves falling down on me. All of a sudden as crazy as this seems my visual vision shifted. I saw the world in extreme vivid colors and realized for the last 18 years my brain was showing me a black, grey, and white world.

This has forever stayed within me, and I realized that when I changed myself, I changed the world around me, this led to me starting my business, podcast, and so many other opportunities I'm involved in today.

Yesterday, I received confirmed I have been invited to give a TEDx talk on social anxiety and the decentralization of mental health individual treatment at a global scale. I have no words other than this is just getting started and I plan to impact billions of people around the world.

Thank you so much for reading this :) means the world to me.

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