An Excerpt from My Forthcoming Book, 12 Steps to Success: Finding Your Purpose

If acceptance is where the story begins, then hope is what keeps it moving.

For me, hope has never been about blind optimism. It’s not a motivational poster or a sunny disposition. It’s something much more elemental than that - something I learned from my mum long before I had the language to name it.

She is, without question, one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever known. Not because she gave speeches or chased big dreams, but because she survived in a way that rewired what I believed was possible. Through her, I saw that sometimes the only option is to act without a plan, without a safety net - and to trust that you’ll figure it out after the jump.

When I was very young, my father was abusive. Not just emotionally or verbally - physically, violently, and systematically controlling. He held power over everything. Finances. Movement. Choices. Reality. And for a long time, my mother bore the brunt of it to protect my sister and me.

Until one day, she couldn’t anymore.

She made the decision to leave. To escape. To run, really - with nothing but her children and the clothes on our backs. No money. No job. No fallback plan. Just a gut-level instinct that if she didn’t get out, we might not survive. She took us to the other end of the country and started again.

I think about that a lot - what it must’ve taken for her to do that. The risk. The fear. The absolute uncertainty of it all. But what that act gave her, and gave us, was space. Not comfort. Not clarity. Just space. Enough to begin again. Enough to believe that something else might be possible - even if she had no idea what it would look like.

That lesson sank deep into me. It built a kind of internal structure I still lean on to this day: the belief that survival creates room for something better. That no matter how impossible things feel, it’s always possible to start over. That you don’t need certainty to move forward. You just need a reason to try.

And I’ve returned to that lesson - that inheritance - more times than I can count.

I moved to London without a job. Just a temporary offer to housesit for a friend while they were travelling. That was the extent of the plan. No strategy. No contacts. Just a pull toward something different and a belief that I’d land on my feet.

Later, I moved to the US after getting divorced. I left behind not just a relationship, but an entire life I’d built around it. Friends. Routines. Familiarity. I started again, this time in a new country, carrying only what I could emotionally and logistically manage. And again, no solid plan. Just that same quiet conviction: something better is still possible.

Then came Warner Chappell. Leaving a senior role in a globally respected company wasn’t something I did lightly. But I knew I was at a crossroads. I’d gotten sober. I was finally clear-headed enough to hear the discomfort I’d buried for years. And once I heard it, I couldn’t unhear it.

So I walked away. No job lined up. No obvious next step. Just a deep sense that I couldn’t keep living out someone else’s definition of success. And then came the collapse.

I set out to build something new - something meaningful for creators. Not from ego or impulse, but from a place of real alignment. It felt right. It felt necessary. And for a while, that was enough to carry me forward.

But the conditions weren’t kind. The market shifted. Investment dried up. What once felt expansive began to narrow. The strategy was sound. The need was real. But the support system beneath it wasn’t there anymore.

I won’t pretend I handled that with unshakable grace. There were moments of frustration, grief, fear. But even then, I held onto something deeper - a quiet, persistent belief that the work still mattered, even if I had to let go of how I thought it should unfold.

That’s what hope looked like then: not blind faith, but staying in relationship with the why, even when the how fell apart.

Because underneath all of that - the grief, the uncertainty, the slow unravelling - something older was still holding me up. That foundation my mum laid - that belief that you can build from nothing - it never left me. Even in the worst moments, it was there. Like a low, constant frequency beneath the noise. A kind of survival-coded optimism: this isn’t the end.

And whenever that belief started to slip, I turned to the one thing that always gives me clarity: helping someone else.

It’s a principle from recovery that I’ve carried into every part of my life:

“The best way to keep your sobriety is to help someone else find theirs.”

It’s never just about alcohol. It’s about perspective. If I don’t know what to do in my own life, I help someone in theirs. That act - simple, grounded, human - never fails to reconnect me with my purpose. And in turn, with possibility.

Hope, I’ve learned, isn’t a mood. It’s a discipline. A way of showing up. A way of trusting movement more than outcome. It’s what makes you keep going even when the path ahead is blurry. It’s the thing you borrow from others when you don’t have it in yourself. It’s the act of building - not because you’re certain - but because you believe something better might exist.

And sometimes, might is enough.

[Taken from 12 Steps to Success: Finding Your Purpose by Eric Mackay. Coming soon.]