Why do you think that leaders hide from funding their vision?
And then how can those same leaders lean into funding that vision?
Okay, so why do leaders hide from funding their vision?
When you say hide, what do you mean?
They don't fund their vision?
It could mean a lot of different things, John.
A few people have answered as literal funding, why people don't invest in their businesses
with the money or loans, etc.
Some people have answered with putting the time, energy, the commitment, consistency,
putting it out there, talking to people about it.
That's also funding.
You can take it either or.
There's a reason why we use funding as a keyword in that because you as a leader can take it
whichever way you like it.
So that's...
Okay, no problem.
So why do you think leaders hide from funding their vision, John?
Oh, sorry.
I didn't know you were waiting for an answer.
Yeah, well, certainly Donald Trump is not one of those.
But not many people are like Donald Trump and love him or hate him.
The fact is that he's a vampire.
You cannot kill him.
He just bounces back all the time.
And he completely funds his vision all the time.
And there's a bunch of entrepreneurs who do that.
I think that a lot of leaders, entrepreneurs fail to fund their vision because a lot of
people don't want to be seen as a show off.
It's amazing.
If you've got a person who's a left brain thinker, and so that's more operational, accountancy
style person, then they don't want to show off.
And so therefore they tend to sort of just make their money in their business, but they
don't fund their vision because they're frightened that people will call them a show off.
I've got a couple of friends like that.
They're very wealthy.
They've made their money in real estate.
And they do have a number of things that they would love to do, which are charitable things.
But they don't do them, not because they're lazy.
They're far from lazy.
It's just that they think that if they do that, they'll be seen as showing off, which
is crazy.
Which is crazy.
That's a very different insight than I've ever got before.
So how do you...
We have a TV show that we produce called Dreams Can Come True.
It was all about making dreams come true for needy people.
And whether that was they didn't have a home to live in and we surprised them with a home,
or whether it was that they wanted to meet Michael Jordan, we got them to meet Michael
Jordan, or whatever it might have been.
It was Dreams Can Come True.
That was the name of the show.
And I'll never forget Steven Spielberg said to us when there's a little boy who was only
14 years of age and he had a very bad illness, but he was a filmmaker and he wanted to one
day meet Steven Spielberg.
So anyway, we pulled it off.
And Steven Spielberg said that he would meet the little boy if we brought him over to the
jungle, would you believe, in the Amazon because he's producing Jurassic Park.
But he didn't want to be on camera.
He wanted to do the right thing, but didn't want to show off on camera that he let the
little boy meet him.
And we had a really difficult time explaining to him that we were trying to spread good
will around the world by showing that people like him were willing to go the extra mile
and help out people.
And once he realized that the whole idea was that we wanted to show that people like him
could help people, he reluctantly said yes.
But he just didn't...
He didn't want to show off.
And he said, yes, Steven Spielberg.
Wow.
Yeah.
So in your experience, and John, then how can those leaders then lean into funding their
vision?
If something stops me and I have a vision but I'm not funding it and I want to but I
don't know how to or something stops me in subconsciously, consciously, occasionally,
in my group, etc., what can they do?
This is going to sound cold-hearted, but hang around a new group because I've got six millennial
children and I keep on saying to them, don't make the mistake that I made in my 20s and
early 30s and that was I hung around people who didn't fund their vision.
I hung around people who kept on saying to me, why?
If I said to them, let's do this, let's do that, let's do that, their question to me
was, oh, why?
And I said, look, hang around people who say, why not?
The people you want to hang around and not people who would just say, go for it just
for the heck of it.
You want to make sure that if you come up with an idea, it's got some rationale, some
sensibility to it.
But in my mid-30s, I woke up to myself.
I stopped hanging around people who would say, oh, why?
My name is John DeWyne but I get JD.
So I get, oh, why JD?
Why JD?
Then when I started to hang around a different group of people, they would say, yeah, why
not?
Let's do that.
Why not?
So my advice to anyone who might be in that position where you have got a vision and it's
just not happening, you might be hanging around the wrong people.
Thank you for sharing that.
I don't know which book it is, but the thought comes into my mind that you are the average
of five people you hang out with.
And if you are not the higher average, you're most likely the one going to be in the middle
or the lower side.
So you want to increase that average.
So thank you for sharing that.
Yeah, you got it.
And it's funny how we don't consciously all the time appreciate the value of the people
that we hang out with.
But drug addicts hang out with drug addicts.
That's just the way it is.
And people who are greedy hang out with other people who are greedy.
And so therefore, every now and again, if I find that just psychologically I might be
feeling a little bit low, I wake up to myself and think, hang on, who have I been hanging
around the last year?
And it's amazing how, I think it was Jim Rowan who came up with that particular phrase that
you mentioned.
The average of the five or six people you hang out with.
Thank you for saying that.
Thank you.
I have a few more questions for you.
But during your 30s, you make that change.
And I think a lot of people don't realize that they need to make it until it's too late.
According to you, John, what defines a great leader who can recognize these things, who
can actually apply those things, and who can attract these things?
So they avoid the mistakes that you make, or I make, or someone else makes.
And they fast track their life two years ahead.
So what do you think is a great leader in that aspect, John?
Well, Harry, first of all, I've never made a mistake.
So I don't know what that would be like.
My favorite dad joke when I'm doing seminars or webinars is that, look, I've never made
a mistake.
And then, of course, I pause.
I don't know, except the mistake I made in 1992.
And that mistake was that I thought I had made a mistake.
So anyway.
Yeah, look, I think Sir Winston Churchill summed this up.
When he was Prime Minister of England, he went back to his school that he went to when
he was a child.
And one of the children asked him a question because they could.
They could ask him a question.
They said, Mr. Churchill, if you had any advice for us, what would it be?
And it's quite a famous speech.
It's called the Never Give Up speech.
And he said to that little boy and the rest of the people in the class, my advice to you
is no matter what you do in life, whether you become a butcher, baker, candlestick maker,
or Prime Minister of England, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever,
ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever,
ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, I mean, that's number one advice.
And look, again, you can love or hate Donald Trump.
I mean, you know, like he—well, there's 50% of people in America that hate him, and
there are 50% of people that love him.
But even those who hate him cannot say that he's a giver-upper.
I mean, with all of the stuff that was thrown at him, he just kept on hanging in there.
And, again, you can love him or hate him, but you've got to give some credit for his
sustenance.
And I think if, you know, you are going to become a great leader of your family, of your
community of your business or whatever it may be, you have to have that quality of not
giving up easy.
Just don't give up.
Hang in there.
And I think that's probably the biggest, biggest quality of a great leader.
They just never, ever give up.
That's awesome.
Thank you for sharing that with me.
I like Donald Trump to a certain extent.
And I want to go to your story with that aspect.
It takes great leadership skills when instead of learning from my own mistakes or failing
again and again, I'm able to learn from someone else's mistakes.
And it takes even a great leader who admits, hey, I made this mistake and I don't wish
anyone else to do so.
So what are some of those stories where you chose not to give up, John?
And what are the lessons that you learned from it?
The most recent never give up was a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle.
I've got six millennials and only last night we went out to dinner with one of them.
He just turned 27 yesterday.
So his name is Shane and it was his birthday yesterday.
So my wife Gail took him and his girlfriend Tess out for dinner.
And we gave them a proper present, but then we gave them a gag present.
And because they know that my attention span is that of a goldfish and I would never do
a jigsaw puzzle in my life.
I mean, if you said to me, make a choice, do 10 years in jail or do a thousand piece
jigsaw puzzle, I would take the 10 years in jail.
So I've got no attention span.
Last words, I cannot get involved in anything like that that involves concentration.
I am not the person for that particular dining room table.
So anyway, we gave this jigsaw puzzle.
It was a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle of the yellow submarine, the Beatles.
And he just looked at me with a right grin and said, yeah, I bet you never bought this.
I said, no, your mother did.
But yeah, look, I guess my best, I mean, we've been on the roller coaster ride and Harry,
you've decided to go down the entrepreneurial path and you're a thousand years younger than
me, but you know, get ready because it's a roller coaster.
It's not a merry ground.
If you want a merry ground, just go and get a job.
And the entrepreneur world, of course, you have to just basically be resilient, otherwise
you don't last.
And we've had a few kicks in the guts, but the biggest one was 20 something years ago,
I had a business with 20 odd staff.
It was called Dynamic Ideas, meaning that it was an advertising business.
And someone who was working for me at the time when I went over to America to visit
Disney because we're doing a lot of Disney licenses.
So therefore we take out the license for The Lion King or Little Mermaid or Beauty and
the Beast.
And we would do posters and books and stickers and trading cards and all sorts of things.
And when I was away, he was printing one of the bubblegum card series that we had and
he made a big printing mistake and we lost $2.2 million in a week and consequently lost
our house and everything that goes with it.
So therefore we were down and out and my staff was 20, got cut down to eight or nine pretty
quickly.
And the bank said to me, look, we're going to close you down at the end of the month.
And it was a pretty tough period.
And the only way that I could get back on my feet was to get this trading card license
for the rugby league here in Australia.
So in Australia, the football code is called rugby league.
It's our version of gridiron.
And as it turned out, there was five companies pitching for the license to produce these
trading cards.
And I annoyed the daylights out of the guy in the rugby league home office just ringing
him every day to ask, we put our proposal in, but so did four other companies.
And we were just as mentioned, just a very small company compared to the other companies
who were pitching for this license.
And I knew if I got it, we'd make the money back.
And I said to the bank, look, can you keep me open till the end of the month?
Because they reckon they'll make the decision on who to give the license to by the end of
the month.
They said, yep, we're going to lock the doors at the end of the month.
Harry, 10 minutes before five o'clock on the day that the bank was coming to lock the doors,
we get a call from the rugby league office.
And it's the guy who's making the decision.
And I'm shaking, of course.
And he said to me, you've got the license.
And I could wipe the sweat from my brow.
And I said, oh, thank you.
He said, I'm on condition.
And I said, well, it's not anything.
He said, you never ring me again for the rest of your life.
You're the most annoying so-and-so.
Because of course, my whole life was depending upon getting this license.
So of course, I was annoying him for day after day after day.
He's a great friend now.
And he was being sarcastic, of course.
He just said, you just never gave up.
You just never gave up.
He said, I had nobody else from the other four companies pitching that rang me every
single day.
I said, oh, well.
And years later, I explained to him that my livelihood depended upon it.
And we got the license.
And because we're marketers, we were able to promote the trading cards through newspapers
and on the TV football shows and all sorts of things.
And we made that whole $2.2 million back in one football season.
And we got back on our feet and put a roof under the kids' house.
And we made that comeback.
The only way that we did that, though, was for me not only to be persistent, because
persistence beats intelligence by a million miles.
So persistence, but also just not giving up.
That's awesome.
That story, I bet there's more sides to the story.
A story like, what was your wife feeling?
What was your children feeling?
What was the rest of the employees in your company feeling?
And who supported you?
What were their words of encouragement?
Who doubted you?
Would you like to show some insights on that side of the story?
Wonderful, Harry.
Just absolutely wonderful.
And the kids at that age were probably too young to know what was going on, except you
wouldn't believe it, Harry.
When you're on a down cycle, just everything keeps on happening.
And you think to yourself, goodness me, how long am I going to hang in there for this
cycle to break?
And the day that we left our house, we had a 14-acre property in the country about two
hours north of Sydney.
It was a beautiful property.
It was a lovely house.
It was a guest house with a log cabin and a tennis court and little golf grounds.
And it was just something out of Disney World.
And we worked hard to get this.
And of course, we'd lost it.
And on the day that we were leaving that home to go and drive to Sydney and to just have
a little rented apartment, the day that we left was Mother's Day.
Would you believe it?
Mother's Day.
So I had lost the house for the family on Mother's Day.
And as we were driving out of the driveway of this property, I remember I just glanced
across at my wife, Gayle, and she was hiding it, but there was tears rolling down her face.
And I felt pretty low.
And the reason I felt particularly low is because Gayle, my wife, ended up having a
double whammy because guess what?
Her father had lost two or three homes on the horses.
He was a compulsive gambler.
So she'd grown up with this sort of roller coaster ride, not because her father was necessarily
an entrepreneur.
He was a very well-paid accountant, but he was a gambler.
And so therefore, she'd grown up losing two or three homes.
And of course, she married an entrepreneur.
So she's crazy.
And it was just a very emotional day for me because it was just terrible when I looked
across and saw your wife crying, but hiding those tears.
She would never let me see them.
And yeah, throughout that period of that comeback, which was a pretty quick period, I must confess,
when we got the license to do the trading cards for the football code, within 12 months,
we were back on our feet.
So it was a pretty quick comeback.
But nonetheless, she was there with me from, you know.
And you know that someone asked me the other day, look, when you've been through one of
these kicking the guts, what would your advice be aside from just not giving up?
And I said, don't sleep.
You go to bed at midnight, you get up at five because you have no choice.
And they said to me, and that's what happened.
I said, absolutely.
And I'm sure it's the case for everyone else who's been through one of these kicking the
guts.
You just go to bed late, get up early.
Yeah.
Thank you for sharing that.
That was very authentic.
I think it was pretty close to your heart that you shared that with me.
So I thank you, honestly, sincerely for sharing that with me.
No, my pleasure.
And Harry, look, the upside of that story is that I was dropping the children off who
only, you know, five or six at the time, a couple of them.
We have six children, but we only had two at the time.
I was dropping them off at the little St. Joseph's Catholic school one morning in the
new area that we moved to that we were renting.
And you wouldn't believe it.
This was the day after we'd come into our house.
And as I was pulling out from the curb to drop the kids off at the new school that they
were going to, I was just putting my seat belt on.
But a police car behind me saw that I was just putting it on as I was leaving the curb.
Guess what?
He pulls me over and books me, of course, for not having my seat belt on.
You're not going to believe the next part of this story.
So then the kids are running late for school.
This is just the day after we've lost our house.
The kids are running late for school.
So I put my foot on the accelerator to get them to this new school on time.
And I got booked for speeding by another policeman.
So I remember looking up to the sky going, I know that whatever doesn't kill you makes
you stronger.
But look, this is getting ridiculous.
And wait for it.
It gets more stupid.
We get to the school and the kids go into the classroom and I shat around them into
the classroom and the Catholic church is just next door.
I thought I'll go in and say prayer.
And guess what?
I get to the front door of the church.
It's locked.
I mean, it's like at 830 in the morning.
The church is locked.
So I just looked up to the sky and said, look, I'm getting this message.
I'm getting this message loud and clear.
So I walked around to the side of the church and the priest was just opening up the side
of the church and he said, can I help you?
I said, look, I just want the front door is locked.
I just want to get in and say a prayer and also steal some money from the door box.
So anyway, he opens up and I go in and I just said a prayer to the guy upstairs and said,
look, aside from enough is enough.
I just said, if I can get back on my feet, if you can just help me get back on my feet,
I promise I'll do something that will inspire other people who've been kicked in the guts
just to never give up, you know, that hang in there and your dreams might come true.
And as it turned out, guess what?
12 months later, of course, I was back on my feet.
So I had to keep that promise.
So I pitched the show to the big TV network here in Australia like the NBC and it was
a show called Dreams Can Come True.
And it was all about delivering dreams to people who just have been kicked in the guts.
You know, they might not have much money and they didn't have a home.
So we gave them a home.
They might have wanted to meet a superstar like Spielberg or Michael Jordan or someone
like that.
And we made it happen.
And that was the best time of my life.
The TV network backed it and it came out of a Sunday night and it was called Dreams Can
Come True.
And it beat 60 minutes in the ratings.
So when people tell you, oh, look, only bad news sells, good news doesn't sell.
That's rubbish.
This was good news.
Every Sunday night we had a former rock star in Australia, like a big rock star host the
show and he was right across the whole mantra as well.
Because this is all about you could write into us not for your own dream.
You had to write into us to say, could we produce a dream?
Could we fulfill a dream for someone you knew?
And it was a great experience.
It was great fun.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.