02: Heroin Addict goes from Homeless to CEO // The Story of Joe Roberts

Three days before Christmas 1989, I was sitting on a park bench in the pouring rain in downtown Vancouver, trying to figure out where the next $10 was going to come from. At the end of the day, Eric, we are bigger. So much bigger than the crap that comes to us in life. There's more to each and every one of us.

Welcome to From Rock Bottom to Rockin It. I'm your host, Eric Gilbert Williams, and this is the podcast where we explore personal stories of people. Absolute rock bottom, then got back up, wiped off the dust, kicked failure to the curb, and now they're rocking it like you'd never believe if you didn't hear it. Live right here, we cover subjects in business, sports, and life in general. If you like this podcast, please share it. These interviews are intended to inspire, to motivate, to give hope and vision. So please share this episode with someone who needs it. Use your Instagram Account, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Hand signals. Trained pigeon sent smoke signals up in the air. Use Morse code, whatever you like, just share the love and share this episode. Also, email me anytime. Podcastricilbertwilliams.com Send me questions you would like to have asked of future guests and I will incorporate them. Or just send me some suggestions on how to run a better podcast. Or just say hello, I'd love to hear from you. That's podcastricilbertwilliams.com I know you're going to love today's interview, so let's get started. Our next guest here on from Rock Bottom, the Rockin it is the winner of the Ontario Premier's Award and the Courage to Come Back Award. Joseph Roberts. Joe's received an honorary doctorate from Laurentian University and was recently awarded the Meritorious Service Medal from the Governor General of Canada. But Joe's life, however, wasn't always sunshine and rainbows. In fact, 25 years ago, he pushed a shopping cart in Vancouver's downtown east side as a homeless drug addict. And he's going to tell us about that. Today, Joe maximized his second chance in life to create extraordinary business success, which he's also going to tell us about. But it didn't stop there. Joe and his wife Marie started the Push for change initiative, a 17 month, 9,000 kilometer walk across Canada to raise awareness for funds for youth homelessness. Yeah, literally push a shopping cart 9,000km. He's a living testament to the idea that anything is possible. Joe, welcome to the show. The Skid Row CEO. How are you doing today?

Hey, I'm good. Good, Eric, it's great to Be on the program.

I'm really happy to have you here. I love your story. It's powerful. And I was looking at photos online and I saw you got a haircut.

Yeah, eventually. Yes. Well, we all grow up, right? It's funny, when I do keynote presentations, I show the before and after. And even when I graduated college, I had hair that went down to my back. But, yeah, we did conform to some of the conservative norms within our business community.

So my understanding of your story is that you physically pushed a shopping cart, like a grocery cart that you would see from a grocery store all the way across Canada, 9,000 km. Is that exactly what happened? This sounds like superhero shopping cart powers here.

Yeah, well, first of all, I did in fact walk over 9,000km across the widest part of Canada. But the shopping cart was a modified shopping cart. In fact, Eric, it came from Calgary.

Oh, no kidding.

Yeah, so when we were designing the shopping cart, we used a focus group with a group of kids from a local secondary school. And we were thinking, you know, a shopping cart. And they said, well, shopping cart is kind of big and heavy. Why not use something that's like a shopping cart? We said, well, what's like a shopping cart? And they said, a high performance baby buggy, like a baby carriage. And I was like, oh, that's such a great idea. And at the time, my trainer, which was Dr. Shawn Richardson's wife, Kate, she was having her second child and she actually had one of these Chariot carriers. Now, Chariot is now owned by Thule Group, but Chariot was an independent manufacturer right out of Calgary. And so we went to their organization, asked them for donation, and they were more than happy to oblige. Then we took the Chariot, stripped it down, and then local metal fabricator welded a cart on. Now the whole idea behind the shopping cart, though, it was symbolic. Shopping carts represent chronic homelessness in every city in the western world. It's an unfortunate thing, and it's sort of the end of the line. And when we were thinking about inspiring Canadians to think differently about youth homelessness, 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. And it was also a throw to my story. It's like, you know, in the late 1980s, I pushed a shopping cart around the downtown east side collecting cans and bottles to the supported a drug dependency. So we thought, why not walk across Canada, push that symbol of chronic illness, and have a conversation with stakeholders, with municipal, provincial, federal, Governments and talk about what we can do to better support kids when they get into challenging times, when they face issues like mental health, addiction, family conflict, or they're dealing with trauma. You know, because it's in those critical years that if the child gets the resources they need, they can go on to do incredible things. I mean, your story is a case in point. You know, what if we could provide every young person the tools they need to be successful at an early age and then cut them loose, that let them find their potential. If we do that more effectively, we can dramatically decrease the amount of adult homelessness we have on the street. So it was really a business and pragmatic approach to what can we do to change outcomes on homelessness in general, but specifically on what can we do to better empower kids to when they deal with crisis, when they're couchsurfing, when they've left home, when they're, you know, having some challenges with substance abuse, they can get the help they need before they end up pushing shopping carts. So, yeah, the engagement idea was walk across Canada. So I did in fact walk over 9,000km one Canadian winter. I'm kind of proud of that. That was in northern Ontario, which this.

Is a humid, deep, all encompassing type of a winter and snow environment, specifically up in northern Quebec and northern Canada. Areas like this is. Imagine northern Russia meets Iceland, and every frigid, crazy story or video you've seen produced by Hollywood. This is what Canada is like in the deep winter. But we're just too polite to talk about it. But that's real.

It's kind of like Minnesota. Okay, this is like Minnesota or just horrendous conditions. But gosh, it was fun. And the distance for our American listeners, it was the distance from New York to la, back to New York, except it was about six months of that was in that Minnesota weather. So it was pretty epic. But what was cooler than walking 9,000km was how people engaged.

Right, Tell me about that.

Yeah, it was when we started, this was just this little grassroots idea. The idea was sort of born on a flight to Calgary from Vancouver with my then business partner, Dr. Sean Richards. Sean's a former Olympic athlete and he wrote his thesis on over training. So he's a sports psych. And we were just kind of knocking around this idea on how do we inspire and engage Canadians. And he suggested, well, why not run across Canada or walk across Canada? And we were, you know, inspired by iconic Canadian legends like Carrie Fox and Rick Hampton. And so we thought, yeah, I mean, Canada is this really unique place. We're the only country in the world, right, that has one highway that goes from one end of the country to the other and engages 85% of its population. And that's one of the reasons why there are so many folks that cross the country for a cause. But we also recognize that walking across the country wouldn't be as hard as engaging the country. We live in a time of engagement fatigue. And there's so many things grabbing at our attention today with social media and all these things that just sort of compete for our attention. So it was important for us to get really great community partners. One of the biggest partners that came on board was the Ontario Provincial Police and now the oppone of the largest police forces in the world. And they got on board because this was about child safety, this was about crime prevention, this was about protecting Ontario youth. And so they got behind us in a big way. And once that happened, our sponsors, the United association of Canada, which represented the unionized pipe fitters and steam fitters and sprinkler fitters, they got behind us financially and next thing you know, we were on our way. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police then supported us, and then all of these hundreds of agencies came out to support us and businesses and. But I remember when I walked into Ontario, I completed about 2,400km and I walked over the Quebec, Ontario border and waiting for us on the other side was the commissioner of the opp, about a thousand people and none other than the greatest hockey dad in the world, Walter Gretzky. That's when I knew, you know, eastern Canada was sparse. We had excellent engagement in the big cities, but we didn't have day to day engagement. And when we got into Ontario, it was a game changer.

It would be, and this is a game changer for the thousands of people that are inspired by your message. The engagement that you've instilled on people everywhere is making a huge difference. How do you gauge that? I'm assuming that you've touched so many people's hearts and people come up to you and tell you their stories. Tell us a story about someone's life that you really changed. And you know someone that came up to you and told you, they said, hey, Joe, I listened to your story and you made such a life changing difference to me. They're like, joe, I read your book or I saw you on stage or I listened to your TED Talk and here's the change that you made in my life. Is there a story particularly that comes to mind on this subject?

There's lots of those stories because I'm a prolific speaker. I've written a couple of books, and I do a lot of speaking. Yeah, I've had one story like that. I remember a gal come up to me at a conference, and she said, joe, I was at a conference 10 years ago, and I was going through crap in my life. I was going through divorce and a career change, and I heard you speak, and I went out, and it's so weird because here I am ten years later, and I'm going through some more crap. And she says, but I just really loved your story, and I don't think it's my story. I just want to take a humble step back. Any story of overcoming have the seeds of instruction embedded in them because they are examples to the rest of us. Why do we love the movie Rocky 1 or the movie Blindside? Because they exemplify the resiliency of the human spirit. At the end of the day, Eric, we are bigger, so much bigger than the crap that comes to us in life. There's more to each and every one of us than we see. And adversity introduces us to ourselves. So when I get up there and I tell the story of, you know, average kid, Canadian town, ended up, you know, a heroin addict on the streets of Vancouver. That's a sad story. But what it does is people then identify with their own struggle. I would imagine you, when you talk to youth, as an entrepreneur, but also as somebody who's been through stuff, they lean forward and listen to you because it's not your story they're identifying with. It's their own struggle.

It is. And there's people listening to this right now who are going through their own big struggles, and they feel alone. And I know that when I was younger and going through my biggest struggles, I felt alone, too. Maybe you felt alone. And this whole podcast, From Rock Bottom to Rock, and it is about talking about these stories, it's about bringing to a real dimension, something tangible. These things, these amazing stories, are real. They do happen. It's just like you said, you know, inside of us, we're so much bigger than we might realize when looking just at the surface. And let's let that out. And so, Joe, for people listening right now that don't know your full story, can you please share with us what was rock bottom? What was bad? How bad was bad when you were down there living on the streets, pushing a grocery cart? If you can share with us a little bit about that, please.

Well, I think the way I describe it is. I was probably at one of the lowest points you can be in in the Western world. 1989. I lived under the Georgia street viaduct in downtown east Vancouver, the poorest postal code in Canada. I pushed a shopping cart. I was addicted to crack cocaine and heroin. Every single day I woke up and it was a crisis. You know, I know we want to try and keep this podcast Evergreen, but right now, as you and I speak, Eric, we are in the midst of first month of the coronavirus hitting the entire planet. You're in lockdown in California. We're beginning to face some really big things. We've seen about a 10 trillion dollar correction in the Dow. The world is facing fear, uncertainty and doubt. When I look through that lens, I go back to my experience of being on the street where every day was a crisis. Every day I woke up to uncertainty. Every day I didn't know whether I was going to be able to get through that day. And I was so afraid. And that's what the world's going through right now. So here's what I know is that no rainy day lasts forever. And we are so much, and I have already said this, but we are so much more than the circumstances that are going on around our lives. And in so many ways, the crisis that we as a world are facing is going to introduce us to ourselves and we're going to find out individually and collectively that we are so much bigger than the challenging times that we're facing right now. In the late 1980s, to sort of further flesh out the question, I basically lived on a day to day existence in the downtown Eastside, struggling with addiction. I was one of those people you'd see in an inner city, you know, walking around mumbling to himself. But you'd also look, look at that person and probably easy to write that person off to say, you know, it's really difficult to see that person's potential. But inside me, that entire time were the seeds of potential was possibility. And I think for folks listening to this who are struggling emotionally with what's going on in their life or in the world around them is that at any moment we are nothing but a powder keg of possibility and potential. And my getting cleaned and entering recovery, I have to tell you, at the time, that was a disruption in my life, one that I didn't welcome. Just like there's a disruption in the world right now that we're not welcoming. But guess what, on the other side of that, there is some really good stuff coming. Hard to see right now because we're in the midst of that emotional uncertainty. But I guarantee you there's going to be some really intensely positive things that come out of this on the back end.

And right when we come back from this short break, Joe, I want to ask you, how do you make that jump from your rock bottom moment to getting out of it? Is there like one decision in the brain? And once you make that one decision, it snowballs like a domino effect and just triggers all of these other subsequent decisions that help make all changes possible. Tell me about that when we come back from this short break. Hey everyone, Eric here at From Rock Bottom to Rockin It. And on today's episode, I decided to support an organization called Sketch CA. Sketch CA is an organization focused at helping youths between ages 16 and 29 that are living homeless or on the margins, navigating poverty, to make all kinds of art, performing art, physical art. There's a 10 week workshop in the fall, there's one in winter and in spring as well with a special summer workshop too. It's an organization that's designed at helping kids that are in need. And I say kids because when you're 16, I think you're still a kid and early adults as well. And When I was 16, I was in a lot of trouble, as you guys know, as you're listening to the show. And it's organizations and it's people that cared, people that reached out to help me is what really helped to make a difference in my life and maybe even save it. So organizations like Sketch CA make a big difference to me. They're really close to my heart too. Of course, I'm a Kitchener boy, originally in Ontario. Toronto is just around the corner. So I hope you guys check out the organization, share the website URL with people that need it or need to hear it or just talk about it with your friends and if you get a chance, also donate if you can. That'd be really great. I bet you that every dollar you donate there goes a lot farther than you'd ever imagine. There's a little button in the top right corner. It's really easy to donate on the website. Just go to sketch ca, click that button. Five bucks, 5,000 bucks, whatever you like. Just put in a little bit amount. It's great. It goes a long way. And when we all come together and do something together, then we have a global change that happens instantly. So thanks again and we'll go back to the interview now. Okay, we're back now on From Rock Bottom to Rockin it here with Joseph Roberts and Joe. You know, I remember when I was a kid when I. A lot of trouble, you know, when I ran away from home and dropped out of school and I was off the map for a while. There was a time, a time happened where I wanted to change. I wanted to be different than the people that I had been surrounded around and that I had surrounded myself with. I wanted to do something positive and big and constructive and something that I was going to be proud of. And I didn't know what to do, and I didn't know where to go. And the events in my life led me to cross paths with this particular guy. And this guy, he reached out and he wanted to help me, and he gave me an opportunity. He showed me the ropes of business and sales, and he showed me how to make some different choices in my life. And I remember like it was yesterday, and he said to me, I don't care what you did. I don't care where you've come from. All I care about is what are you going to do now, what are you going to do tomorrow? What are your choices going to be today? That's all I care about. He looked at me and he said that he saw the potential in me and that's what he was interested in, nothing else. Then he offered me this opportunity, and he said it was up to me to then take the steps and follow through. And if that person didn't show up at my life at the time that he did and offer his hand for me to grab onto and step up from, I don't even know where I would be anymore. I don't know what my life would look like at all. I probably wouldn't recognize it if I was even still here. Maybe someone else would have come to help me get out. Who knows? Maybe there wouldn't have been. Either way, I did have that person reach out and truly help me. And what he helped me do was to uncover deep inside me that there is a little treasure box. There was a bunch of hidden potential that needed to be unlocked. And he was the key. He reached out, and with his trust, with his honesty, with his sincerity, and with his genuine nature just wanting to help, he unlocked this little cabinet that was buried deep inside my spirit. And hey, guess what? Once it was open, then I started to discover who I was really and who I could be. And all the cool things that I wanted to do in the world all of a sudden became attainable and real. And so I'm wondering, Joe, was there someone like this in your life? Was There someone specifically that reached out and helped you? You know, you're out there on the streets in Vancouver. You're really struggling. And was there someone that reached out and helped you to change the course of your life? And if there is, please share with us the story.

Yeah, there was a person. And again, our stories are so parallel that way, but I think even if there isn't a person, there is a message, and I think that's what you and I are doing today. But in three days before Christmas 1989, I was sitting on a park bench in the pouring rain in downtown Vancouver, trying to figure out where the next $10 was going to come from. Imagine, you know, like, I lived in a world where I couldn't. I didn't even have a friend I could call for $10. I burned so many bridges, and I was beginning to descend into withdrawal. And the only way I can describe opiate withdrawal to listeners who don't have any sort of connection to that, it's like having the worst flu in the world times a hundred. You get the body aches, you can't sleep, your high anxiety. But you. You know, that $10 makes that go away in a heartbeat. I was rocking back and forth on that bench, soaking wet, and I didn't want to steal because. And I didn't want to rob or, you know, that's just not who I was. And I remember looking down at my. My feet, and I had this really good pair of boots their friend gave me. And I went into the bar across the street and sold them. And I remember coming out, walking down the street completely broken. While I was in that moment of desperation, I reached out and I said a little prayer and I asked for help. And it went something like, God, give me a second chance. I don't deserve it, but if you give me a second chance, I promise I'll pay it forward and I won't waste the opportunity. So that was sort of the rock bottom for me, was the selling my boots. And, you know, I had that moment, Eric, where I just didn't want to feel alive anymore, was just hurting so bad inside. You know, I was so depressed. I was so. It was just a really dark, dark moment, but I ended up getting some help. But probably the person who played one of the biggest roles initially was a guy named Gus, and he spent probably less than 10 minutes with me. I was sitting on a park bench in the downtown east side, and this guy had to be in his 70s. He had this beautiful blue eyes, just have a face and a smile. That was filled with light and love. And he looked at me and he said, you know, Joe, he says, you got this homeless addiction thing going on. But he said, there's so much more to you than you can see. If you were able to deal with some of your surface problems right now, you could go on to become so incredible and so successful and do some incredible things in the world. And at the time when he was saying this to me, I was, you know, wearing dirty black matted hair, I had scruffy beard, broken yellow teeth, black fingernail. Just really terrible personal hygiene and a smell that comes from living outside in the same clothes for months. But he looked past my circumstances and spoke to my possibility. And for the first time, someone in my life other than my mom and dad growing up spoke to my potential. And he said, there's more to you than you can see now. I never forgot that conversation. Thanks to some folks who worked Frontline in Vancouver at the Salvation Army, I got to connect with my mom. And then my mom sort of jumped into the mix, brought me back home. I entered into a detox facility which led to a full residential treatment program. After six months in treatment, I ended up in college. And four years later I graduated with honors. I think that the message more than the person, I hear what you say that there was that person who believed in you, but it's that message that there's more to us than we can see. And my instruction to anybody would be, and you said it is to take some steps. Today is the day to take action. I don't care what's going on in your world right now, it's your actions that matter more than your emotions. Because at the end of our emotions, at the end of that, you know, there is no boogeyman under the bed. At the end of our emotions, it's nothing. But at the end of every action is a promise. And so no matter how I feel, I take action. It's the one thing that I'm proudest that I've taught to my 16 year old daughter is that it doesn't matter how you feel, it matters what you do. So what can I do today? And even if it's as simple as taking one tiny micro action towards your hopes, dreams or goals of changing your life, Anybody can take one action right now after they're done listening to this podcast, write down five things that you can get done today and do one or two of them and then do one or two of them tomorrow. My story of success isn't that I opened a Door. And it was like, oh, it was a million little actions.

Wait, are you trying to tell me that there wasn't a magic bullet that changed everything in the blink of an eye? Didn't happen?

It's interesting because I've done a. You know, I've done thousands of interviews over the years. What's your one secret? My one secret is I got up this morning at 5am and I did the things I said I was going to do.

Yeah, consistency.

I keep at it. And I understand that when I feel that emotional roadblock, it's so important to push forward. You know, one of the things that Dr. Shawn Richardson and I co developed, he wrote a piece of intellectual property called the AIR model, where A equals action, I equals inspiration, and R equals roadblock. And the simple model for creating behavior change is to connect to something you're passionate about. That's your I, and the A is the action that I'm going to take. And the R is acknowledging that the roadblocks are very real. Both macro, sort of situational roadblocks, things that are going on in the world around you, and the psychological roadblocks, the things that mentally get you stuck and hold you back. When you work through that model, you can overcome anything and create any possibility that you want.

Now, let's dive into that for a second. All right, so you've owned your past many times and on the show, and you speak about it openly. And I remember when I started to share my story, just like I'm doing right now on the show as well, there was this huge fear. There's this, what if people think badly about me? And that's just the surface level, because what if I go into a business deal and someone's listened to my podcast and they hear that I was a drug dealer when I was little and that I was lost, and then I dropped out of high school? Like, is that going to cost me a contract? Am I going to lose a business deal because of my past? And these are the sorts of demons and questions that I have to grapple with and tackle in my own mind when I'm trying to share my story. And, you know, maybe I'll go to customs, and customs won't let me cross the border because of something they heard or saw or they read my book. And inevitably there's this voice inside me that says, you know, I could have done better. And I can't believe I screwed up. And, oh, man, I can't believe that that was me. And, man, I don't want people to know about it, I gotta hide it, right? And this is the subject of shame and guilt. And it's powerful. It's a strong emotion that you have to grapple, that I had to grapple and you did too, in order to share this story. Basically, we become our own worst enemy at this point. Like the old Chinese adverb about the two dragons fighting inside for eternity. And when someone articulates their story as clearly and as vividly as you do, it makes me wonder and ask that question. How does someone get over this shame and this guilt? How does someone overcome these inner battles and these emotional turmoils? Where did you find the courage, Joe? And how can other people find the same courage too?

Well, it's like anything. How do you run a marathon? You don't do it in the first day. The first time I shared my story was over 20 years ago. And I read it, I read the had bullet points on a piece of paper and I kept my head down. And it was a women's business networking luncheon in downtown Vancouver.

Well, that's an interesting starting point.

Yeah, it was. And I shared this story. I was literally shaking. Now, you have to understand, at that point, I was a CEO of one of Vancouver's fastest developed, fastest growing media development companies. And nobody, I mean nobody knew that I was a former homeless junkie. Now, you also have to. Let's also frame the context that 20 years ago, addiction, mental health, homelessness didn't have the cachet it has today. I don't mean that in a trite way, but we live in a softer, gentler world around these core issues. Today, thanks to Bell Media, thanks to shows like A and E's Intervention, we understand addiction and homelessness and mental health at a deeper level today. I'm not saying we don't have ground to cover, but today talking about mental health versus 20 years ago and homelessness and a heroin addict. But you know what? My mentor, Peter Legg, who's the CEO of Canada Wide Media here in Vancouver, who's also an accomplished speaker, hall of fame speak, great guy, been a mentor and friend forever. I shared my story with him and said, Peter, what do you think? Is the stage ready for this? He says, yeah, it absolutely is, because all of us go through stuff. So even though I may, there may be one or two folks in the room that might not see it through a left leaning lens, I'm okay with that. I'm totally okay with that. You know what? Not everybody likes early Pink Floyd. That doesn't bother Roger. Walt Waters, right? It's like, not everybody has to be in love with this in order for me to do my mission, in order for me to help people. And so life, you know, love me, hate me, but never forget me. It's been, you know, sort of my brand philosophy. And for those who don't like it, fine. But what I have found, having spoke to over a million people in conferences, is that there's a lot of hurting people out there going through their stuff. And there's parallels. My job as a thought leader and as you know and in my work as a philanthropist in the push for change, is to try and take this message and contextualize it so that anyone listening to this, whether they've got a physical disability, whether they've got early childhood trauma, whether they're dealing with some deep, dark, ugly stuff from their childhood, that they know that that message Gus gave me on that park bench, the same as the message your mentor gave you, which is, you have it within you to succeed, and it's up to you. Take some action and move forward. There's more to you than you can see. And when we take those actions, that's when we discover, holy crap, this. The stuff I've thought about myself all this time was false. We live in this illusion that's not true, that I can't, I can't, I can't. You can't until you try and then prove yourself wrong. But it's getting that inertia broken down. To take that one little step, to put your shoes on and take those first few steps, that's what you gotta bust through. But once you get that going, then you get momentum.

I love this, Joe. This is so powerful. And I want to ask you two things when we get back. First, I want to hear about the time when you knew that you had overcome this rock bottom moment, when you were really rocking it, right? When you came out of all this and you were now on top and you could look back and say, yeah, that's the past now. And the second thing I want to ask you about is the push for change. And if you can tell me and people listening, what is the push for change? What's the initiative? What are you doing? Those two questions when we come right back from this short break. Typically, this is where the host of a podcast would pause the recording and insert a sponsor promo to sell you something that you don't want or need. Well, guess what? That's not happening today. Not on Rock Bottom to rockin it Here you get to hear my voice for 60 seconds. Talk about something that I'm very passionate about and that's helping kids, that's helping the next generation, that's helping people have more solutions and less problems than I had when I was young. Now, Joe's foundation, the pushforchange.com initiative, does exactly that. I went to his website, thepushforchange.com initiative, and I donated some money, my own money, because I believe in it and because I believe in leading by example. So I put my money where my mouth is, donated a bit to his organization and I hope that you consider doing the same. Five bucks goes a lot farther than you might believe. Five hundred goes even farther and so does 5,000. Whatever you're comfortable with, it really doesn't matter. Just check out the website. Consider making a donation. This money goes to help train kids to be thought leaders, to be action leaders and to start their own initiatives. So this is about making them think creatively to help solve long term homelessness. There's a lot of ways to do it. So this is about empowering kids to help join the support network and get the resources that they need in order to make a positive difference. Not everyone can walk across Canada, but everyone can make a small promise for change. Check out the pushforchange.com initiative. And now back to the show. And we're back now, Joe, please tell me about your rockin it moment. The time when you knew you had overcome your rock bottom adversity and you were now on top. This was part of the past. Maybe let's start with business. What were you doing? What did that look like?

There's two, I'll try and keep them quick. But the business one, it was driving this big ostentatious German sedan because for me getting that big car was one of those. It's not important to me anymore, but.

Got to do it.

Yeah, I had to do it. And so I'm driving this great big. It was a seven series. I'm driving this big seven series to my office in Yaletown district down downtown Vancouver. And you know when you're in the car and you just sort of, you blank out and you end up in the driveway, you're just sort of on autopilot. Well, I was in that sort of modality was a lot of things on my brain. And I was going down East Hastings street, which is right in that old neighborhood, that really sketchy neighborhood in Vancouver, and I was just sort of not really paying attention to where I was, and I got stopped at the corner of Dunlevy and Hastings, right where I used to live. And I looked out my side window, and there was a kid who was about 19 pushing a shopping cart full of cans. And it hit me. Here I was, driving this big car, going to my office, and when I got to my office, sitting on my desk was a copy of Canadian Business, and I was on the COVID of it as a celebrated Canadian.

What a contrast in a flashback.

Yeah. It was like we so often forget the ground that we've covered. We're always looking at what we aren't instead of what we've already. The ground we've already covered. It's like when you start a fitness program or you're a business, it's like, well, I'm not where I want to be. You know, I didn't make that. But wait a minute. What ground did you get covered this month, this quarter, this year, this last five years? So that was the moment. And then during the push for change, it was always a dream of Marie and I to engage the. Marie was the campaign director. But when we started, we envisioned having a conversation at the highest levels of government in Canada because, you know, we could raise as much money as we want. If we don't get stakeholders on board, nothing will ever change. There'll be no systemic change. And when we got to Ottawa, we were met by Adam Vaughn, MP Adam Vaughn, and Minister Jean Yves de Cloves, the Minister of Children, Families, and Social Development. And we actually later got an invitation to go and meet the Prime Minister. I remember being in the House of Commons waiting for the Prime Minister to finish question period on the floor and to come up and to meet Marie and I personally. And that was a moment where it's like, wow, we started this little grassroots campaign, and we're now sitting down and talking to the leadership of the country. And then the meetings that followed that really. We got to play a small role in the national housing policy in the country. And three months after the push for change was completed, the federal government announced an $11.2 billion investment in homelessness.

Wow, what an accomplishment. You're pushing forward one little step at a time, climbing that mountain, pushing for change every day. And you're getting it. You're pushing for change, and you're just achieving it. And I'm saying this phrase, push for change a lot on purpose, because I know that this is the name of your organization and your initiative. So please share with me and everyone listening what is pushing Push for change? What are you doing? What's the purpose?

Okay, so the initial push for change was to push a shopping cart across Canada and engage Canadians. We did that. We were extremely successful. We raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. But more importantly, we engaged communities. When it was done, we realized that the strongest component of our campaign was the 100,000 young people that we engaged in high schools across the country. So, you know, the push for change was really that promise I made on that street corner on my darkest hour. I said, when I cried out and asked for a second chance and asked God to spare my life, I said, if I get a chance, I'll pay it forward. Well, the push for change was my promise fulfilled. So when we got done, Marie and I stepped back and said, well, we got this great partnership with the Ontario Provincial Police and raising the roof. Let's keep that momentum going. So we launched a youth empowerment project to get kids to come together to create a promise project in their community to support something locally related to youth homelessness. And what we're doing as a foundation is we've engaged schools all across the country and do a promise project and then submit their project to us, and we're giving out ten $5,000 grants for their charity. So we find it's when kids get involved in youth empowerment projects, they learn something about themselves, they learn something about the issue, and they do something powerful in the community. And that. That was probably the best part. So the push for change is now about trying to create millions of promises, not just in Canada, but around the world. Every single one of us can choose to do something to help someone less fortunate.

So basically, you're helping people to help people. People come to you for help on how to help other people. This is like train the trainer here, basically, right?

Yeah, well, that's what we. You know, I don't want to keep walking. And it's not about me. It's about the momentum of. Okay, what is the core intellectual property with inside embedded into the campaign was? Our campaign was successful because of hundreds of thousands of people that stepped forward to help us help others. And it's also my story. It's like, you know, people say, oh, Joe, you're not this, you're that, you. All these awards and the bio reads well. But the truth is, Eric, I'm a community investment gone well. I'm here today because 10,000 people gave of their time, treasure, and talent to help put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And so if all of us pitch in, then we can. I hate to sound trite, but we can change the world.

We can and we do. And how do people Push for Change on their own. How do they reach out and find you? Where can people find Push for change?

So the pushforchange is pushforchange.com they can go there, learn all about the trek, they can learn about the Promise Project, and me personally, you know, so I do two things. My world is sort of split into two things. I'm the executive director of the foundation. Marie and I run the foundation. We do a lot of school stuff. On the other side of it, on the corporate side of it, I do a lot of public speaking. So conferences, associations, folks can find that profile@the skidrowkidrowceo.com and if folks want to learn more about us and reach out, we're absolutely accessible and available.

So I'm out in Cupertino, California right now, and as you know, in my past, I dropped out of high school and got in a lot of trouble and then, of course, found my passion in business, and it's been a huge part of my life ever since. And I have these funny conversations out here pretty frequently. You know, a bunch of my friends out here all work for NASA, and inevitably, when they introduce me to their friends or we're at a dinner party or whatever, the question always pops up, oh, hey, Eric, where did you go to school? And I always answer them with a straight face, looking right in the eye, and I say, I went to Grand River. And they say, well, what's that? And I answer, well, it was my high school. And it's funny to me because clearly I'm the least formally educated person in the room, basically, no matter where I go. But we're all talking about the same subjects of philosophy or math or science and at the same level. And there must be some funny moments I'm imagining when you're out there telling people about your story. You know, you're doing a business deal, and they ask you what your background was, or they respond with something like, what do you mean you were on the streets? Or, what do you mean you were addicted to drugs? They wouldn't see that right now. They wouldn't hear that in your voice today. I definitely have a few funny moments, and I'd love to hear some of yours. What comes to mind?

Well, it's funny because I got a dark sense of humor, and sometimes people feel, oh, where'd you get your degree? I said, well, I got my PhD on East Hastings, right? Yeah, if you're from Canada or from the area, you'll get it. Or, you know, I. I wrote my thesis at Ocala State penitentiary, right. Or Ocala. I think lived experience is key. I mean, not to downplay education. I mean, I have a daughter. I want her to. I want her to go to college or university. I want her to graduate and get her diploma. But there's nothing like failure to teach us about what life really is. I mean, I got an excellent college education, but my life on the streets and my failure in business taught me more than a lot of that education did. Life experience gives you the emotional intelligence to deal with life on life's terms. Because I don't care who you are, you're going to find yourself walking down the road of life. And life is going to life you, whether it's in business or whether it's in your personal life. No one gets through this thing without going through some stuff. And it's when we go through stuff that we have to open up our resiliency toolbox. And if you've never really had a lot of challenges, maybe you're lucky and you've got a deep resiliency toolbox. Most of us don't. We have to build those things from scratch. And so life experience never, ever shun away from adversity because it always teaches us there's so much more to us than we can see. And as we enter into more and more challenging times on this planet, it's not always a bad thing, because it's going to teach people to go back to that toolbox and figure out their way through it.

What was this business failure that you had that you mentioned a while ago? For some reason, I can't let that go. What was it?

Well, there were a lot of missteps as we were building our company in 1998. We started off as just. We were a website company, and then we shifted into a content development company. But there were bad hires. There were. From a management perspective, I'm an entrepreneur, but not a very good CEO. It's like Peter's principle. I was promoted to my level of incompetence.

Yeah. An entrepreneur is not a business person. But they're both two sides to the same coin. They're both very different personality traits. Would you agree?

Yeah, I would. And there's the whole Gerber, Michael Gerber. You work on your business instead of in your business.

Yeah. I love that book, E Myth.

So I didn't spend a lot of time working on. And we basically had just expensive jobs. We were building a practice, not a business. So there were a lot of things like that. When, you know, you look back and you Go, shoot. Had we done this, maybe we could have franchised it. Had we done this, we could. Maybe we could have gone public. There were a few missteps where we invested wrong and didn't lose millions. But for us, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars here and there, those were important and costly mistakes because they prevented us from growing. You know, when you look at the trajectory of the whole thing, it looks great, but, you know, there were a lot of things in there that were ouchies. But you just kind of take that as you go and you learn.

Now, there's some real contrast for you right there. Earlier you're talking about looking for $10 and selling your boots, and now you're talking about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars like it isn't a big deal. Like, that's a huge leap and a huge contrast right there.

Well, I lost $200,000 last week when the conferences fell out of the corporate world. At the end of the day, you get to choose how you react to the things that life throws at you. And I was probably in a darker place, losing, you know, not having $10 and being stuck on the streets because I was lonely. I didn't know what to do. I was filled with fear and uncertainty and I didn't have experience. But today, you throw that stuff at me now, and I'm like, toughen up, buttercup. I know what this looks like. It's kind of like the metaphor of a sports athlete, you know, yeah, it sucks losing, but they've all lost, and they know what that losing feels like. It's so funny because the context of the journalist versus the context of the professional sports athlete, the journalist thinks like the public, but the athlete thinks like a peak performer. And they're not thinking about it anymore. They're not stuck in that. They're moving on. It's so funny when you see, you know, in the Game seven series of the Stanley cup and they're on Game four, what are you thinking about? I'm not thinking about game seven. I'm thinking about game now. And that's really about what action do I have to take next? And not getting caught up in the emotion. Settle down and do the work in front of you.

And the last subject here as we wrap up is a question. It's a subject and a question around choice versus circumstance. You alluded to earlier being a thought leader. I have this theory that I've been working with that choice is more powerful than circumstance. And what I'm talking about is there's people around me When I have conversations with them and they say, oh, I can't do fill in the blank because of fill in the blank. I can't run because of my leg. I can't achieve this business success because I have a family at home, or I can't do this because of that. It doesn't matter what it is. There's always two fill in the blanks, right? I can't do something because of something. Now, I agree that circumstance is a very powerful. And you alluded to this subject that we can't choose what happens to us, but we sure can choose what to do next or what to do about it. We can choose how to respond to circumstances and events. And in my opinion on this subject, the choice of what we do about what happened to us is more powerful and more important than the thing that did happen to us. And that choice to do something positive is like a snowball effect, right? One little choice to do something positive about something we're unhappy about leads to another choice to do something powerful and positive about that thing we're not happy about. And next thing you know, we have so many choices that add up to be this big life change. In my opinion, far, far more powerful than any event that could occur. And of course, there's people on the other side of the coin that say, no, no, no, circumstance is far more powerful than choice and there's just no way around it. And they argue back and forth. And so it's an interesting subject of discussion is the way I put it. I like having the discussion because it's interesting thought and maybe there's some validity to both sides depending on the circumstance or the situation. So I'd love to know your mind on this. Tell me, what are your thoughts?

No. Choice is everything. Personal responsibility. Here's the thing. The older I get, the more I realize that the keys to success or the pathway to failure is what you choose to do. Today, I don't get to choose my past, but starting right now, my future is spotless. One of my heroes is David Goggins. Now, if you listen to Goggins and you're in a bad place, Goggins will piss you off. Because what he does, he will tell you, this is all about you. This is all about you. How you think, manifest how you think changes how you act. How you act creates your personal circumstances. And so most of us are where we are because of how we. How we think and how we act. I don't have the luxury of blaming my now on nature, the nurture versus Nature thing I have to say, if I want to go from A to B, what do I have to do to change my current set of circumstances and set my sorry emotions aside and get busy at the work that needs to get done? Because the world doesn't care how you feel. The world only cares what you do next, period. So if you're dealing with financial insecurity and I get the emotional stuff, so I just want to say that I support people, but I challenge their behaviors. You talk to somebody who's a blitz, you know, who's stuck in the vicious cycle of active addiction, patting them on the back isn't going to get them clean. Challenging their behavior and saying, today is the day, man, I get that this sucks. I get that this is scary. But the only way to get to the other side is you've got to go through that stuff. And then every single day going forward, you need to wake up in the morning and make a personal choice and decision to do the right thing every single day. Peak performance is about consistency. I have to wake up every day and say, today, I'm not going to use. I'm not going to use drugs. That's where it starts. And then you build on that. But if you want to run a marathon, you got to put your shoes on. You got to train. One of the things I signed up for was an Ironman, not because I'm a peak athlete. I'm not. I didn't become an athlete Till I was 45 years old. But I picked a fight with Ironman because it's so incredibly difficult and requires so much discipline and so much mental resiliency. It's a testing ground, and it prepares you for everything else.

Your story is amazing.

It really is. And if you listen to the great masters, you know, guys that have gone way beyond anything I could ever. I don't want to limit my speech, but who have done things that I admire a great deal. These are people who have mastered the way they think and no matter what, get up every single day and lace their shoes up and go to work and do what needs to get done. So, yeah, it's difficult. And we don't. And I don't know where to start. And I'm afraid. Okay, great. Get an action buddy. Get an accountability. Get a mentor. But don't tell me you can't until you've exhausted every option, because I don't. I'm not buying any can't. So that stock doesn't fly with me because I'm the guy that's the most least likely to be successful. And I found a way through it. And I know that anybody else can too. I'm not special. I'm below average.

Joe and everyone listening to this today, no matter what you're doing, no matter where you're going or where you are, I hope you really anchor this in. Today is your day. Today is a day that you have a choice to make and it's powerful. There's a choice you can make to push forward, to push for your own change. I hope that you embrace this reality that you do have a choice. Re listen to this episode if you need to, and please share it with a friend. And Joe, I really, really appreciate your time coming on here and talking with me. I hope we stay in touch. It would be really great to do something with you in the future, to do something positive in the world together. There's a lot we can do together, even just talking like we are right now on the show. So again, Drew, thank you so much for your time. To everyone listening out there, take a choice today. Reflect on it. What can you do to push for your own change? Have a rockin it day. Remember to share this episode and do something positive for yourself. We'll talk to you all next time. And that's it, my friends, for this episode. We will see you next time. Please send me an email, say hello, give me some feedback, let me know what you think, give me some tips and suggestions. I'd love to hear from you. Also, please share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, doesn't matter. Just get it out there. I really appreciate it. And we'll see you next time on From Rock Bottom to Rockin it. Have a rockin it.