From a fifteen-year-old leaving school for a film camera, to a whiteout at eighteen thousand feet, to building, listing and selling companies, to mentoring quietly behind the scenes. The long arc of one curious life.
Mt Kailash, Tibet · Mark on assignment · age 22
"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too."
W.H. Murray · quoted in the opening of The Hero's Journey
Five chapters
Childhood
Young
I learned to count sitting on the end of my mother's bed, helping her with the weekly takings from her clothing store. She'd spread the notes and the coins across the bedspread and we'd work through them together. My first lessons in business were also my first lessons in trust.
1980s
15
I was easily bored at school. My brother Albert, a filmmaker, maker of Morning of the Earth (1972) and OAM recipient in 2023, set my path. At fifteen I left school to join him in the industry. We made films about things most film crews never went near: spiritual festivals, indigenous ceremonies, places few film crews had been. The operating philosophy was simple: go where others don't go. Tell the stories no one else is telling.
1980s
22
Albert and I were sitting in the cab of a broken-down truck at eighteen thousand feet, somewhere on the Tibetan plateau, in the middle of a whiteout, with darkness closing in. No safety equipment. No phones. No GPS (this was the early 1980s). Not a single person on the planet knew where we were. I felt completely lost, and more than a little terrified. And yet, strangely, inexplicably, I also felt completely alive.
1990s to 2010s
Building
What followed was three decades of building. Companies started from nothing, grown, taken public, sold. Boards joined. Founders backed. Mistakes made and learned from. Through all of it, the same instinct that took me to Tibet at twenty-two: go to the edge, look honestly at what's there, come back and tell the truth about it.
Today
Now
These days I work quietly. Sydney by day, the farm in country New South Wales whenever possible. A small group of mentees. A handful of ventures I genuinely care about. Books that took years to be ready to write. And a family (my wife Michelle, and our children Ruby and Jesse) who are the reason any of it matters.
Mt Kailash South Face, Tibet · Mark on assignment · age 22
From the opening of The Hero's Journey
“I felt completely lost, and more than a little terrified.
And yet, strangely, inexplicably, I also felt completely alive.
Mark Falzon
Tibetan plateau, eighteen thousand feet · the night that became a book
The Practice
The frameworks I teach now didn't come from a classroom. They came from 45+ years of building: from that night in the truck on the Tibetan plateau, through three decades in boardrooms and startups, through hundreds of mentoring sessions with founders willing to look honestly at what was driving them.
I work with a small handful of inspired entrepreneurs and CEOs each year, not at scale, not at speed. The work is done at the farm in country New South Wales, in long conversations that go into the evening, with the people who are ready to do the inner work that the outer work requires.
The cast is always more important than the set.
45+
Years building
300+
Films produced
100+
Countries reached
6
Active ventures
Where to next
The films. The books. The mentoring practice. The ventures. Different rooms, the same instinct.