I'm not a great man doing great things. I want to be honest about that upfront, because if I'm asking you to show up without armor, I should go first.

I failed at relationships. I failed at friendships. I created fragility in my marriage, in my family, in my relationship with my children. I bounced between alcohol and depression for years — and I hid it well. I kept the job. I kept the smile. I kept everybody comfortable except myself. Most people had no idea. But the people I love the most? They knew. And they suffered the most because of it.

I take medication. I see a therapist. I probably always will. I still struggle — and I think I probably always will. There is an emptiness inside of me that has been there for a long time. Not that long ago, I realized I don't have very many friends I can actually call — and that's no one's fault but my own, because I pushed all the good ones away. A couple of the men I loved the most left this earth, and I wish I could have been there for them. Sometimes I thought this earth was too much for me. I stepped pretty close to the edge a few times.

But I had enough left to know this: we can't rewrite the past. Some relationships will never heal. Some friends I miss will never come back. Some of my children may carry resentment — maybe for the rest of their lives — for things I did or didn't do. But it doesn't mean I have to step off that ledge. Because it's not over.

The moment I started admitting my failures — out loud, to real people — and stopped being afraid of looking bad, stopped lying to myself in the mirror… something shifted in me that a decade of white-knuckling never could. Not in a boardroom. Not on a podcast. Over a fire at 1 AM with no one watching, sitting across from another man who said “me too.”

Joseph Campbell wrote that the hero's journey is not the story of a man who conquers the world. It's the story of a man who descends into the darkest version of himself, faces what he finds there, and comes back changed. I named this retreat after that idea because I lived it — not as the hero, but as the man who had to be dragged into the cave before he'd admit he was lost. I built this because I needed it and it didn't exist. Not the retreat with the corporate facilitator and the trust falls. Not the one with the sweat lodge and the spirit animal. Something stripped down. Something real. Something for the men who are quietly falling apart while keeping everyone else comfortable.

Every detail of this weekend was designed by asking one question: what would have reached me when I was at my worst? The food matters because a man whose guard is down deserves to be nourished. The silence matters because most men have never sat with themselves without a screen or a drink or a task to hide behind. The guides matter because when a 70-year-old man tells you what he wishes he'd done differently while there was still time, it lands in a place that no book or seminar ever reaches.

I searched for the right place for over a year. When I found it, I knew. A stone lodge built by hand over a hundred years ago, sitting on a hill above a lake. The kind of place where wealthy men once arrived by train and were chauffeured to the door for six-dollar dinners — a fortune at the time. The kind of place that hosted some of the most infamous names in American history and kept their secrets. It has walls that have absorbed a century of stories. Now it'll hold ours.

At the retreat, you won't know I'm the founder. Not when you step off the bus, not at the first meal, not during the afternoon. I'll be just another man who showed up. I carry wood. I pour coffee. I sit in the same silence. Friday night, at The Fire Ceremony, I'll speak my name like everyone else. Because if I'm asking you to drop the armor, I can't walk in wearing mine.

The answer was never a lecture. It was a fire, a long table, and someone honest enough to go first. So I'm going first. That's all this is. And if you're reading this far, you probably already know you need it.