Why I built Monumental

It did not start as a business idea.
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I was in my late thirties, the company was doing well by any measure, and I was not doing

well by any measure I actually cared about. I had friends. I had a partner. I had a full life on the

outside. And I had almost no one I could be fully honest with.
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That is the thing about success at a certain level. It comes with a particular kind of isolation

that is hard to name, and harder to admit. You cannot complain - not really. You are one of the

lucky ones. So you carry it.
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I had been sent to boarding school at eight. I do not say this for sympathy - plenty of men had

it harder, and plenty loved it. But the psychological inheritance of that experience is real: a

learned self-sufficiency, a high threshold for loneliness, a deeply held belief that you handle

things yourself and do not show the parts that are struggling.
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That works, until it does not.
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I started running men's circles not because I had the answers but because I needed the room.

I needed to sit with men who were carrying something similar and find out whether what I

was experiencing was real, or whether I was, as I had long suspected, just not very good at

being a person.
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It turned out it was real. And it turned out there were a lot of men sitting in the same version

of it.
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Monumental grew from that. Not from a gap in the market, though the gap exists. From a

genuine need that I had, and that the men around me had, and that nobody was building

anything adequate for.
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The Network meets every Monday. It has done for years. The men who have been in the

longest are the ones who say, most consistently, that it changed something fundamental - not

just in how they feel, but in how they lead, how they relate, and what they are building their

lives towards.That is why I built it.

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