Former Dragon from Dragon's Den | W .Brett Wilson & Joe Polish

But no, I joined the Dragon's Den show in its third season. The first season I watched, I thought this show is kind of stupid because the questions that were asked were stupid. The responses were stupid, and I thought the show was irrelevant. Second year, I watched it again, and I felt the same. It was stupid. It was irrelevant because no one does a deal based on you do your due diligence before you do a deal, and in this case, your due diligence follows the deal on air. So there's something stupid about that. Then just before the third season started, I was invited to be a Dragon. Well, all of a sudden, the show became relevant.

How would you describe yourself? I mean, let me say. Can I say this first? There's a book, Michael Fishman talks about it all the time called the Culture Code. And he talks about the different codes for things. And in America, the code for work is, you know, who we are. Like, it's the identity of. Of like. So when you say, you know, most people go into their business stuff and in a conference like this, that would be a normal thing in context to say, but, like, who are you? Who is W. Brett Wilson?

Well, my Twitter account describes it best, and it didn't happen quite right away, but it says, grandfather, father, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and a couple other things. Those don't matter. But it's really the celebration of family for me. But that took a long journey to get there.

Yeah, yeah. So in terms of your companies right now, you've been involved in a lot. I don't know if this is still accurate, but I think you had more investment deals on Dragon's Den. For those of you that aren't familiar, how many of you have seen him on tv? Yeah, he's from Canada, right?

Canadians only, though.

Dragon's Den is like Shark Tank in. In.

You know, in fact, it predated Shark's Tank because o' Leary and Herjavec were my partners on the show as they were trying to get Shark Tank off the ground. And Shark Tank was failing miserably. They were doing four episodes a year until Mark Cuban came on, and suddenly they had brand. Now o' Leary and Herjevic, great guys, no problem there. But they didn't have the brand to build the show. When. When Mark Cuban showed up, it was a different thing. But no, I joined the. The Dragon's Den show in its third season. The first season I watched, I thought this show's kind of stupid because the questions that were asked were stupid. The responses were stupid, and I thought the show was irrelevant. Second Year I watched it again and I felt the same. It was stupid, it was irrelevant because no one does a deal based on you do your due diligence before you do a deal, and in this case your due diligence follows the deal on air. So there's something stupid about that. Then just before the third season started, I was invited to be a Dragon. Well, all of a sudden the show became relevant and I had the privilege of getting on the show, the viewership, and just to give you numbers in Canada, Hockey Night in Canada, which is a big deal, is a million viewers. By our last season, we were doing two and a half million viewers on this goofy little Wednesday night hour long show. And so it built brand, which is why I get recognized in a lot of places in Canada. But Dragons Den is a very, very, very small part of who I am. It's a big part of my profile. I mean, I've done probably 500 stage visits, 10001500 interviews. Very comfortable with a microphone. Doesn't mean I'm any good at it, but the show gave me a platform to work from. It's partly how I met you. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally.

Okay, so I guess with what it's easy to ask what makes a successful entrepreneur? How have you been successful? But what I'd like to delve into, because you're totally open about talking about stuff as how have you fucked up? How have you, like, what are the mistakes you've made? What are the.

We only got 25 minutes.

Yeah, yeah. The three days we're gonna spend talking here starts right at this moment.

Now let me do some paraphrasing really quick. So I was born in a small town in Saskatchewan. My mother was a social worker. My dad was a car salesman. And that's why I sometimes describe myself as a capitalist with a heart. Finished high school when I was 16 years old. Been bullied a lot, picked on, went off to university, first year of engineering. I'm looking around and these guys are absolute dorks. They've got jeans that are torn, shirts that are dirty, glasses that are taped. And for the first time in my life, I fit in. And it was great. And I ended up getting involved with student politics. I had seven elected positions in my last two years on campus. From residence to central student body to the senate. And I started building self confidence, probably more than I needed, but certainly lots. And ended up working as an engineer for a few years up in the Arctic, across Canada. Some extraordinary experiences. Then I ended up doing a business degree. I did an MBA at The University of Calgary. My specialization was in entrepreneurship. And I really, truly fell in love with the world of entrepreneurship. A place that I'd been afraid of. My dad had bought a grocery store when he was younger and it had failed quickly. And so my parents didn't speak glowingly of anything entrepreneurial. It was, how do you pay the bills? Well, you have a job. And so that was really my focus. Then the world of entrepreneurship stumbled along. I spent five years with one of the biggest investment banks. It was associated with Shearson Lehman. And I had some extraordinary experiences in investment banking and energy partners. And I built an investment bank from scratch. We put up 2 million of capital. It was valued at over 300 million. Ten years later, we were doing 100 million of revenue. And you can imagine that in an Investment Bank, 95% goes to salary. And the partners took most of that. So we were coining it left, right and center. Everything that you ever want to celebrate in terms of recognition. I got listed as one of the top M and A specialists in the country. I got listed as one of the top 20 deal doers in the country. Recognition and philanthropy, left, right and center. But to jump to probably the pivot point, I still remember the night vividly where I was stuck at home babysitting. And that sentence in itself tells you almost the whole story. Stuck at home, babysitting. I was parenting, not babysitting, because it was my own kid. And being stuck at home, in hindsight, was a huge mistake in my mind. Made a lot of money. So we had a big house. And the bigger your house is, the more you can spread your family out, so the less you have for connection and communication. That was really important to me at that time. And the reason I was stuck at home that night was that I had wanted to be at an art auction. There was a particular artist whose piece of art was up that was going to change my life. So I had to be there. But I decided to call in by phone. That's fine. Anyway, the phone rang regularly that night. I was in the office. I had a couple of kids in two of the other bedrooms, way at the other end of the home. And I finally phoned the auction house and said, where are you at with this, Lindner? And they said, well, we've already sold it. I was pissed. And I said, well, Peggy, I told you I wanted to call. She said, I called three times and a little girl said you weren't home. So now I've got every right to be pissed and I'm going to rage at this little girl for what she did to me. I remember going up to Rebecca's room, opening the door, and she's lying on the bed, crayons, coloring, whatever she was doing. Nine years old. I don't remember what I said to her in the two minutes that I was standing there. Three minutes. But she crawled under her bed. She was so afraid of this vicious prick standing at the door. What I remember the most was the last sentence, which was, what the fuck are you doing telling someone I'm not home? And she looked up at me and said, well, you never are. That was the first time I'd ever cried standing without a reason to think it undermined everything I'd ever done in the previous. I mean, the reason I worked hard was to show my family how much I loved them. How fucked up is that? Anyway, I sat down in another room and I just realized how screwed up things were. Everything I just told you about in terms of success and the recognition was absolutely meaningless given what I'd accomplished. And I ended up through a circuitous route, discovering a place called the Meadows, Wickenburg, Arizona. And I checked in for a month. My partners at the investment bank thought I was gone forever, that I was going to bow out and be done. I left the Meadows after a week, with the encouragement of my counselor. She said, you know what you got to do? And my book really speaks to this. The book's entitled Redefining Success. And the full title would have been if they'd had room for it, Redefining Success in a Wealth Obsessed World. And we live in a wealth obsessed world. I've heard many speakers, many coaches challenge that, and I appreciate that greatly. I've loved what I've heard in the last day and a half, but we do live in a wealth obsessed world. Your first words when you define success is the size of the house, the size of the wallet, the size of the party, the size of your office, the size of the desk, the size of everything that's based on the shallow and superficial trappings of wealth anyway. And the subtitle in the book, by the way, is Still Making Mistakes. And I remember negotiating with Harper Collins or whoever my publisher was in terms of. I wanted the longer name. And they said, well, why don't we just call the book Still Making Mistakes? I said, look, my life's not that I want the headline is still Redefining Success. And let me tell you, I just spent two weeks in Hawaii with the daughter I raged at. I just spent two weeks in Hawaii with her husband. And their six month old baby. The four of us were there and there was tears when we went our separate ways. So trust me, I've recovered the gap that I created that night because. But a lot of it was, well, thank you. But it really came down to resetting priorities. And someone else has made the comment, it might have been Derek, but he was talking about how do you define success? And that's a really interesting question because most people define it by accomplishment. And ultimately, and I'll jump to the closing line right now, is my daughter who coached me and she's heard me tell this story exactly as I told you. She's been in the audience a couple of times and she just waves and I love you, dad. But her comment is, why can't we define success by the size of the smile instead of the size of the wallet? And it really drives home for me the importance of how I've evolved my life. I've been to more than 50 countries with each of my daughter and my son. I've been to 30 countries with my oldest daughter. I have three kids, two girls and a boy. They have amongst them three husbands. I couldn't be more in love with all three of the husbands. I'm struggling with my relationship with my oldest daughter right now. She's just like her mother, but that's another story and I'm learning. And actually, Amy Chan, wherever the hell you are, you gave me a couple ideas, so thank you for that. Thank you. The daughter I'm struggling with, I work with a coach. I have a full time coach and he came to me 10 or 12 years ago and we did not like each other. That's because he asked the tough questions and tough guy pissed me off. Anyway, we stuck it out and he actually offices in my offices now looking after other people. And anyway, my daughter reached out to him about three months ago to get coached on how to get through to me. So we're working on it. And it's just something I'm again, I'm working on because I care. And that goes back to the definition of success. The size of the smile, going back to definition of priorities. And that became, you know, the night that I was stuck at home babysitting, My priorities would have been wealth, art, the car, the cars, the house, the holidays, the jet, the visits, all of those things that would have been my priority list. Why? Because those are the things I did to make sure my family knew I loved them. Coming out of the Meadows, my priorities shifted. Very simply, number one, health. A lot of people Talk about physical health. Well, as you know, there's sexual health, physical health, emotional health, spiritual health, there's the relationship health. There's a lot of things about health. And the reason your health is so important is that without it, you've got nothing to give the others in your life. So that became my number one priority. And a lot of us try to prioritize other people in our lives, but if you don't have your health, I mean, I'm a four time and I heard the word cancer survivor and I've evolved that to the word cancer graduate. First time I got cancer scared the off out of me. I was the C word, meant I was going to die. And I still remember driving in a car I had. A friend of mine was driving at a 15 passenger van. We're taking all our kids up to the lake and I'm writing out my funeral plans. I'm crying, the kids don't know I've got cancer. And all of a sudden, someone from the backseat, my son taps me and says, dad, all right, we'll close the book. And we're done. And I thought I was going to have to tell him something because I was afraid he had read something in my notes and he said, dad, I have to pee. Well, that was the end of my pity party and we stopped peed and kept going anyway. So there was a fear factor embedded in cancer. Round one, and it led to the meadows. It led to a lot of different things. But the second round of cancer was 14 years later and that was just a learning moment. And round four was around three was three years ago and round four was a year ago. And to be blunt, round five is next Thursday. And because of targeted therapy, I'm completely unafraid of the cancer I deal with. So there's no problem there. But I really do believe I became a better person because cancer may have saved my life. The death spiral I was in in terms of work, life balance and family. Cancer gave me every reason to rethink that. That's that fear factor, that scare factor. But it can wax. So number one priority would be health. Number two is family. And I've screwed that up a few times, but it is a priority. Number three is friends. I live for friends. I absolutely love my friends. I enjoy spending time with friends. I put a higher priority on friends than the charities I support and I'm working on that more and more. Number four is education, and that's your learning. Whatever you choose to do, how you learn, whether it's online or books. Or, or university or college. I don't care. It's learning. So that's number four. Number five is the career. You gotta pay your bills somehow. And number six is community. But there's many things I do that engage all six. And that's the fun factor. Whether it's taking 60 people to Mexico to build homes. Well, that sounds like charity. No, it's the best team building work I do with family and friends. It's extraordinary. We happen to build some homes, people benefit, but our benefit is multiples. And the guy who runs this program in Mexico, Shawn Lambert, Homes of Hope, as he calls it, it's mutually transformative. So there's a bunch of work there. So anyway, reprioritizing my life allowed me to redefine success, and it's got me to a much happier place.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. That's great. Awesome. When you finally walked into the Meadows, like hopelessness, you know, you have financial means, so you learned how to be financially successful. And then you had. Then you had this place where you, you know, the darkness. What did it take for you, other than, you know, the daughter might have the conversation there. That was obviously maybe the domino that started that. But as you walked in, what happened? Where were you at in that state? And then I'd like to hear, like, what happened when you walked out and all of a sudden you had a new pair of glasses. You know, that's a term used in recovery a lot, a new pair of glasses.

So the Meadows, I didn't know it at the time, but the Meadows is where some fairly well known people go. And there's still.

I've been to the Meadows before.

There's a few first names I know I see on TV who are in my program. And we were left to leave it as first names. Only 30, 40 people in a circle. And we're all explaining what's wrong with us. And I'm looking at people, and what was really bizarre is there was a young girl, 19, 20 years old, who talked about the dysfunctional relationship we she had with her parents. Again, I'm sitting there and they come around to me and ask, what's your addiction? What's your issue. And I'm like, well, I don't. You know, I don't drink alcohol. I chose not to drink alcohol a long time ago. I don't do drugs. I like sex. But that wasn't an issue. It was with my partner. Work, addiction, wealth, addiction, those words, health, you know, I just wasn't focused. I wasn't doing things that were right. And so I ended up at the Meadows because I thought that might help me. What was fascinating, though, again, this young girl says relationship with her parents is a complete fail. And all they ever want to do is buy new cars and big art. And I'm like, fuck it. Where this girl's talking to my daughter. I mean, it just. Jesus. And then another woman who looked a lot like my deceased mother said, if this week, if this place doesn't work for me, I know how I'm going to kill myself. She looked like my mother. And then there was a young gay man who said, I'm tired of the multiple relationships that I've had. I want one. I want one focused relationship. And there was another person who was quite a bit older than the rest of the average of the group. I was in my 40s. And they talked about the dysfunctional family relationship they had because of their drug addiction. So anyway, what was bizarre is those are the five or six people I remember who ended up in my small group. All of them were in my small group. It's almost like I chose them. And the way the Meadows works, as you know, is there's. You know, the idea is that pain lives below anger in the hierarchy of human emotions relative to. And you. Most forms of addiction are a form of medication, so you're medicating the pain. But in the Meadows model, they help you deal with the anger that lives above the pain so you can release the pain. Pain. I've never cried more than that week. I'm sure you had a very similar experience. And that's really why, at the end of that week, I came home, because I knew what I had to do. It was a restart, reload, but largely reprioritizing. And so the Meadows. The Meadows was magic for me. I've heard it criticized. I've heard it challenged, as I'm sure any addiction program would be challenged. But it worked, and it worked well for me.

Yeah, well, you know what I think the question is, does it work? Does your life work? Right? Because all the different ways that someone can get to recovery or betterment or whatever it is, the question is, you know, if what you're doing is allowing you or helping your life to be better and you to be better and you to feel better and you to connect better, then that is better, right? It just is. And I mean, I even have a friend who's the founder of. I'm sure is. Yeah, Ken is friends with him. Tim is friends with him. He's in the room. He's the founder of Co Dependence Anonymous and he was the director of the Meadows for many years. And I was like, so how did you create, you know, coda? And he's like, well, here I am, you know, being the director of the Meadows, and all of us therapists are helping people with this, but we ourselves are all fucked up and we had no place to go, you know, and so, you know, he created it for. So, I mean, even people that are helping, you know, the people that help other people sometimes don't have people helping them and they don't help themselves.

1. As you may recall, most of the people coaching at the Meadows were themselves graduates. So they had a greater empathy than would have otherwise been imagined. The other interesting thing that was a reveal at the Meadows is I've had bipolar disorder from some time. It's considered mild, not severe. I live on the high side most of my life, which is actually a plus. When I slipped from the high side into depression, I know how hard that is on me. Last, when Covid started, I slipped into depression. There's a online tool called the Hamilton Scale, and you can go Google it, but do the Hamilton Scale and be honest. And I scored 24. Severe depression is 25. And I wasn't trying to impress or surprise anyone. I just wanted the honest answers. And anyway, I worked with a coach, I some supplements, doesn't matter what they were and what we did, but I got to a 12 in six weeks, eight weeks. So I came out of depression and it was a magic because of the businesses and the issues. I was a landlord, I was a lender, I was a borrower, I was a tenant. And I thought I was fucked on every side in terms of the way Covid was unfolding. So. But my other class comment, really on the issues of bipolar is if you want to judge me for the fact that I have a mental illness, let me be crystal clear, the shame's on you because I'm not feeling it again. We can talk about it. Here we go.

Well, what I'll do, I'll ask you one question just simply about, because you've done very well in business and you have. I really like your perspective. Why is Capitalism so important.

I think it's the inspiration driven by capitalism because the all for one, one for all in socialism, which, you know. Anybody know who Pierre Trudeau is? He is the end of Canada. He is. What did I say? I'm thinking, yeah, his father was the problem. If his father hadn't had that random sexual experience with the addiction initially.

Anyway.

So, no, let's focus on Justin the Sun. You're absolutely right. It's not good for Canada. It's not good what's happening. You know, I'm not. Again, some of you know about the blockades that are occurring and whatnot. I'm a huge fan of the convoy. As long as the convoy was anti Trudeau, but when it becomes anti economy, it's not working in its own favor. And so they're undermining themselves. And I've had communication when they. Someone took 8 million bucks away from the GoFundMe program. Some of you might know this, but they'd raised a lot of money. Then GoFundMe locked it down, said no more. They approached me and said, would I substitute for the 8 million? And I got into a conversation with the guys leading the campaign, and I was prepared to go to the hundreds of thousands, not millions. But they didn't have a great use for it. It wasn't clear what they wanted to do. And my biggest issue is we can't undermine the human side and the economy of Canada to make a message. I mean, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 truckers are not 37 million. So we still have to follow conventional governance. Flip side is that Trudeau is so disrespectful of the efforts of some, he called it the fringe. It was a fringe minority with irrelevant commentary. So we have terrible, terrible leadership. I mean, you got Biden. Fuck, you're in trouble, too. But anyway, it's. And Camilla. Well, I've never been to Paris, let alone the border. Anyway, enough on her. We do watch what's going on on both sides of the border, but Canada's in trouble right now with this bent, and some of it's driven through social media. No matter what you do, you get attacked. I've stopped, by the way. I'm active on social media and people ask me how I put up with the attacks. I don't read them. Yeah, I just post and then people comment and I don't read them. I don't care. You just can't.

You should follow him on Twitter and see what.

Yeah, it's F. Bombs are allowed. They go further anyway, Anyway, I have no idea what the question was. The question was quite random. And the answer was worse. Hello, there we are. So I do believe in capitalism, but I believe in the spirit of entrepreneurship that's embedded in capitalism. It's certainly, you know, people talk about, and this is where I really get pissed off, is when people refer to, in the education programs, small business and entrepreneurship off Small business. Nuh. No. Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking, whether it's small, medium, or large. Some of the largest corporations in Canada have entrepreneurs running them. Some of the smallest companies have people with their head up their ass running them. So let's celebrate the spirit of entrepreneurship. What makes things different? What do you do well? What do you do better? What can you do differently? I mean, this room's full of entrepreneurs. I get it. But I get pissed when they keep in school. Schools and education programs link small business and entrepreneurship. Bullshit. Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking. Let's teach it.

Yeah, great, great. So, you know, a lot can happen in a day, like in 10 minutes. Like, you know, Derek Sivers talked about how he spent, you know, 10 minutes writing up what he thought was a silly letter and then he sent it out. Yeah, exactly. So if you could go back a decade and do anything, focus on anything, learn anything, unlearn something that you think would have had the biggest impact or that would be applicable to everyone here, what would come to mind? It doesn't have to be one thing. What would be a couple of things.

It's easy to draw a thread through that, go back in time, and that really is the messaging. And I think it's embedded. It's important for all of us when we can. Every one of you is an influencer, whether it's friends or family or elderly or partners, doesn't matter. But it's the idea of defining success appropriately. And I wish I'd done it differently a long time ago. You know, at the time of divorce, I wanted the kids. 50, 50. My ex said, where have you been for 10 years? Well, I was working, but I wanted the kids. 50, 50. And it's changed things dramatically. And so it's just that idea of defining success by your overall happiness. And this has come up. I've heard the theme in the conversation several times. But the idea that we're just chasing more. I remember there was. Who was that? Greek, like wealthy Greek. Aristotle Onassis. And Jackie Kennedy is asking him, how much is enough? And if you saw the show, he was crystal clear, how much is enough? More. I want more. That was the most fucked up message I've ever heard. I have enough. So what do I do with what I have? That's the real question. And if I can't generate happiness with it, I haven't done a very good job. Yeah, I'll leave you to think about that.

Well, If you could only leave one piece of wisdom or thought or direction to your kids, what would it be?

It comes back to those priorities. Look after yourself. If you don't look after yourself, you've got nothing for others.

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