01: From Rock Bottom to Rockin' It // Our Launch Episode

Welcome to From Rock Bottom to Rockin It. I'm your host, Eric Gilbert Williams. On this show, you're gonna hear about some amazing people who have some particularly interesting stories.

At the age of five, I was given two prosthetic arms. And so how would you like to go flying with me?

I was the CEO of one of Vancouver's fastest growing media development companies. And nobody knew that I was a former homeless junkie.

NASA has a whole kind of regime of telescopes that they call suborbital. My role was looking at galaxies.

To play in the NHL as a goaltender, you're the mental rock. It's a tough position and you have to be very mentally strong.

I was on fire. I had just topped $20 million in.

Sales and then I flew in the military for six years.

You have 12 hours to crawl under barbed wire. Razor barbed wire, the kind that cuts you. For me, with the prosthetic leg, I actually had to take my prosthetic leg off.

We had 30 stores. The whole organization was a $30 million operation.

And I get to make a living doing it. So I get to still make a living playing golf. So everything I dreamt of as a kid is happening.

There is just nothing like sticking a landing, especially at a competition. It is one of those great feelings, competing and even winning a medal at the Olympic Games.

But this isn't just a podcast about people who are rocking it today. No, these interviews are with people who came from absolute rock bottom, then got back up and wiped the dust off their shoulders and succeed in life and you and I are going to go and dive into these difficult circumstances and events which they needed to overcome before succeeding.

And he had his hands on my throat and he was about to kill me and I could feel his thumbs very close to my windpipe and it would have just taken one big squeeze and I'd be dead.

When the recession hit, I got caught and ultimately I lost the whole company.

So I exploded and ended up with burns to, well, 75% of my body. I ended up in the hospital every two years until I was about 20 years old.

My father got into an altercation and ended up going to prison. So now I have a father with mental health and as a youngster, I'm visiting my dad in jail. Over the course of two and a half weeks, two suicide attempts, second one being hospitalized. It's a tale as old as time that everyone that found that out about me was, man, I had no idea.

Then I saw the 7 inch fishing knife and I kept trying to protect my body and I was using my hands, and he managed to saw three of my fingers on my left arm as I was grabbing the knife so it didn't go all the way through my chest. But he really meant to kill me.

Yeah, I was drinking 25, 30 beers a day, and I said, you know what? I just feel like doing this. And I put the gun under my chin and pulled the trigger. I didn't even know if it still had bullets in it. And it did.

And in between the bike and the car happened to be my foot. I spent a few months in the hospital and countless surgery after surgery to try and save things, and it just ended up to the point where we had to amputate my leg.

When I was pushed into this marriage and sent off to Canada as a child bride with a much older man who I'd never, ever met before, my education was put to a stop. And I was told, you should be grateful that you got to the real purpose of being a woman.

And then the obvious question comes up, Eric, why are you doing this? Simply put, I'm doing this because I want to. I'm doing it to pay it forward for karma, to helping others, because I feel like it's the right thing to do, and because I believe that talking about these subjects is how we all heal and get through them. You see, when I was little, I struggled with my own mental health. I was a victim of bullying. I had trouble learning in the school environment. I had essentially no friends at all. I was very awkward and extremely shy. And finally, when I was 15, I snapped. I dropped out of school, I left home, and I went to live in a drug house with a new set of friends who offered me freedom in a form of peer acceptance, which at the time, I valued more than anything. I was both a troubled kid and I was a kid in trouble. And this new group of friends accepted me in while I went through a process, my own process of self discovery. By the time I was 17, things got serious. I had been arrested twice, charged with trafficking, possession of proceeds of crime, breach of probation, and I couldn't keep a job. People around me were getting really hurt. They were in fights, they were overdosing, they were getting locked up in jail. But something happened to me when I was 18 that I will never forget. Someone helped me to make a different choice. A bunch of people did, actually. I surrounded myself and found myself surrounded by people who wanted to help. They reached out and they gave me another chance. They helped me make healthier choices. And most importantly, they helped me discover my Inner passions. And that's when the next wave of real work began. I started studying like never before, researching stories like the ones that I'm sharing with you here on this show about people who struggled and succeeded and often both at the same time. Listening to stories like the ones that we're exploring on this show are the same types of stories which helped to save my life. And ultimately I found my passion.

I always say, you know, there's really two schools of education, I suppose, and I'm the example of someone that Left school at 15. The shopping cart represents the outcome we're trying to avoid for every kid, every child in this country and around the world deserves to grow up, realize their possibility and potential.

People create limits in their life and. And I feel like when they do hear my story, they are able to realize that the only limitations are those that they create in their own life.

I suppose street smart. And I think that's kind of a common thread with a lot of entrepreneurs.

We often feel that we want to learn everything before we do it, but it's actually the doing that leads to the learning.

You don't work right because you always do something that you want to do, and it's a totally different experience in your life. And I'm really fortunate that I found my passion.

I'm hoping that by sharing these amazing stories, you're going to learn something and that you'll find the same sort of help that I found in them when I was struggling too.

Any story of overcoming have the seeds of instruction embedded in them because they are examples to the rest of us.

Being strong is not about not feeling weak. It's about getting back up.

When I first started speaking, a girl came up to me after the assembly and she rolled up her sleeve and showed me all these cut marks, deep gouges, and old scars and fresh scars. And I was the first person she ever showed. She was about 17 years old, so she could wear long sleeves if she wanted to. And just my talk to the school, I was the first person she shared it with. And I said, would you like to talk to your school counselor and let's get this thing going? And she said, yes. You have those moments. You have those days where you sit back and you look at yourself, you figure out, okay, here I am, where do I want to go and how will I get there, and what is the first step? Because the most important step is the next step.

Life doesn't stop because your back hurts or your leg hurts. Life does not stop for all of these things. Life Just keeps on moving and it will pass us by.

Life sucks and then you die. Well, I've died and you know, life doesn't really suck. After you die. You go, hey, I've got bonus time here. You know, it's like hitting the bonus button.

The power of community that it has on healing.

My business career led me down a roller coaster path and after my third failure, I drove across the country to start another company. On my last dollar of my third consecutive maxed out line of credit. I was dead broke and I was desperate and ultimately it built that company to be number one fastest growing company in my city. As per the growth 500 in Canada, the company grew to about 60 people and several million dollars of annually recurring revenue. Throughout that whole process, I competed across Canada and the United States in amateur cabaret, salsa, and even won first place in a competition in Las Vegas. I flew incredible stunt planes over the desert with enough G force to basically black out almost. Anyways, I traveled through Italy, Iceland, Greece, Australia, Thailand, Japan, and explored a rainforest in the middle of the night. Did a solo trip on a motorcycle from Canada to Mexico. I bought a hang glider, took some flying lessons, and a couple years ago I sold that company. It was time to move on and I found myself ultimately with a bunch of free time and some extra resources. So between then and now, and then to my next venture, here we are, you and me, on this podcast. On this show, I pay for every episode. I am the sponsor because there are no other sponsors. In fact, I usually donate some money to charity during every episode and I hope that you will do the same and follow my lead. So enough about me. Let's do the first interview. The only thing I ask of you is to please subscribe to this podcast, follow the episodes like them and share them with your friends. Most importantly, share these episodes with people who need to hear them. People that are reaching out for help. We'll talk to you all soon. Until then, have a rockin it day.