- Everybody in the room has a story.
My story is I was never good enough,
never amounted to much.
When I was in grade 5, one day I came home from school.
I wrote a multiplication exam that day at school.
My mother worked as a nurse's assistant,
my dad was an engineer.
Engineers are very touchy-feely people, aren't they.
(laughter).
Right, so my mom comes home from work.
I go up to my mother, I show her I got 98%
on my multiplication exam.
She's so excited, she wants to put it on the refrigerator.
My dad comes home, same time every day.
Being an engineer, step by step, very methodical.
My dad comes home, walks in the door.
I run to my father, very excited, show my dad I got 98%.
He looks at it, he analyzes it,
and what do you think he did?
He says, "You missed it by two percent son."
He walked away and washed his hands and sat down for dinner.
At that moment, my interpretation in my life
was I am not what?
Good enough.
Anybody have parents like this?
Look around the room.
It was a transformation in my life.
See, what my father didn't say out loud and verbally
was son, you can always do better son.
He didn't verbally say that.
As a young boy, I translated that I'm not good enough.
So in our life, sometimes your greatest insecurities
of not being smart enough.
I felt for a number of years of my life
I was aloof, I felt invisible.
In my younger days, I'd walk in a room like this,
I felt that nobody would see me.
I felt dumb, I felt stupid, I felt I'd go some place
and nobody could relate to me.
Who am I, I barely passed public school,
I didn't amount to much in life.
But inside of me, I had a dream.
I used to get in trouble for daydreaming
because I would visualize, create vision boards in my mind
of what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go,
had no idea how.
Here's something I want you to look at
is linear and non-linear thinking.
You see, in schools, we program children to go to school,
get good grades, and then come out with student loan debts.
That's what we call linear thinking.
So rather than going to school and saying
how do I save up money to afford
a college university education,
why don't you say how can I get paid
to go to college or university.
See the difference?
You see, a lot of you in this room,
you say well how the heck
have you traveled all over the world?
How do you do that, because I asked myself,
how do I get paid to travel the world
and do what I love and love what I do?
Does that make sense?
Some of you want to go to Australia.
How can you get paid to go to Australia?
I don't know how to get paid, I'm an engineer,
I'm an architect, I'm a construction worker.
Well, maybe there's a construction worker's
conference in Australia.
Maybe you're going to go over there and do some research.
Maybe there's some philanthropy (slurs words).
Maybe your church will sponsor you.
Maybe someone will give you air miles
and donate them to you.
But all's you gotta do is start thinking in your mindset
is how do I get paid to go there?
I get paid to go to Africa.
I was in Africa three times last year.
It's not a huge amount of dollars, one of those,
but it's an experience, does that make sense.
I fly over there, I collect a lot of air plan points.
I meet some of the most fascinating people in the world
who have practically nothing
in terms of materials and goods.
I've worked with some of the wealthiest people
on the planet Earth, most affluent,
I've been with the most impoverished people.
It's amazing.
We meet people.
They don't know they're in poverty.
They have no perspective on that.
They just are living life every day.
50% mortality rate in Africa.
It's changing now by age five.
Where do you play into all this?
One thing is, how do you want to grow a successful business?
First of it is, have an idea.
Understand this, your idea is going to be ridiculed.
People are going to laugh at you,
people are going to make fun of you.
Understand this, in the beginning
they're going to call you crazy.
Then they're going to call you lucky.
Then they're going to call you a crook.
You're always going to be hugged and slugged in business.
Some people are going to hug you.
Some people are going to slug you.
I had a woman that was supposed to be here tonight
that flew in here, I pissed her off earlier today.
She flew back home.
She flew in here from Saskatchewan to be here tonight.
I had to meet with her this morning about her business.
She flew back, she's not here tonight.
Because I told her some things she didn't want to hear
that if she kept on doing,
I didn't tell her the dream, I sold her the nightmare.
I sold her the nightmare, if you keep doing
what you're doing, here's the end result.
Why, 'cause I've done it and I've got the scars to prove it.
How many can relate this in business?
You've got scars and things have gone sideways
in partners, deals.
As I told her, this is from my experience,
from practical knowledge,
this is what's going to happen to you.
She didn't want to hear it,
she exited and left and went home.
Flew all the way out here.
The thing was, I had a conversation with her late last night
and all this kind of stuff,
it really freaked her out and upset her.
The thing to understand is,
you're going to have to have uncomfortable conversations
sometimes with people.
You're going to have to sit down with your family
and say listen, I have a dream, I have a goal of my life
right now, and I need to focus on where I want to go
and what I want to do.
There's going to be times in your life
if you want to become a millionaire,
want to become very successful,
that you have to become self-aware of yourself
and realize that you have to shut out
all the noise around you.
You have to go inside yourself
and you have to run this race where there's nobody around.
You know, it's interesting,
I've met a lot of people who run the Ironmans,
the Boston Marathon and stuff like that.
They'll tell you that in their training,
there's a time in their life where when they start,
they blow the whistle or shoot the gun,
there's all these people around cheering for them.
As they're running the race,
all of a sudden there's less and less people.
Every couple kilometers there's somebody on there
who's handing them water.
They said it's won between the two ears
of mindset and mental toughness,
do I keep going even though I have a cramp,
and do I quit, or I take the last two, three,
four, five years of intense rigorous training
to persevere and keep going.