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What is your vision? Featuring John Dwyer. Podcast Session 1.
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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, um what you meant they don't fund the vision or?
It could mean a lot of different things, uh John. A few people have answered as literal funding. Where why people don't invest in their businesses with the money or loans, et cetera. Some people have answered is with uh putting the time, energy, the commitment, consistency, um 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 key word in that because you as a leader can take it whichever way you like it. So that's.
I could argue, 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. Um. Yeah, well, certainly Donald Trump uh is not one of those. Um. But, you know, not many people are like Donald Trump, uh and love him or hate him, the fact is is that uh he's a vampire. You cannot kill him. He just bounces back all the time. And uh he completely funds his vision all the time. And there's a bunch of, you know, entrepreneurs that do that. I think that, you know, a lot of leaders, entrepreneurs, um uh fail to fund their vision, um 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. Um 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, you know, a show off. Um 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 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, wow, that's a good, that's a very different insight that I've ever got before. So how do you?
We, we, we had a TV show that we produced called Dreams Can Come True. It was all about making dreams come true for needy people. Okay, 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, you know, only fourteen years of age and he had a very bad illness, but he was a filmmaker, uh, 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 goodwill around the world by, you know, showing that, you know, people like him were willing to go the extra mile and help out people. And, uh, 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, you know, he just didn't, he didn't want to show off. That's Steven Spielberg.
Wow.
Yeah.
So, in your experience then, John, then what,
how can those leaders then lean into funding their vision?
If something stops me, um, 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, uh, occasionally, in my group, et cetera, what can they do?
Um, this is gonna sound cold-hearted, but hang around a new group, um, because, uh, the-
I've got six millennial children and I keep on saying to them, don't make the mistake that I made in my twenties and early thirties. And that was, I hung around people who didn't fund their vision. I hung around people who kept on saying to me, why? And if I said to them, oh, let's do this, let's do that, let's do that. Their question to me was, oh, why? And I said, look, stand, hang around people who say, why not? You know, the people you want to hang around and not people who were just, you know, say, you know, go for it just for the heck of it. You want to make sure that, you know, if you come up with an idea that's got some sort of some rationale, some sensibility to it. But in my mid thirties, I woke up to myself, I stopped hanging around people who would say, oh, why? My name's John
Dewey, but I get JD. So I get, oh, why JD? Why JD? And then when I started to hang around a different group of people, they would say, yeah, why not? Let's do that. Why not? And so, you know, 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, you might be hanging around the wrong people.
Wow. Thank you for sharing that. There's a, I don't know which book it is, but the talk comes into my mind and that you are the average of five people you hang out with.
Yep.
And if you are not the higher, 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, you know, we don't consciously all the time appreciate the value of the people that we're hanging out with. But drug addicts hang out with drug addicts, you know, that's just the way it is, you know, and, and, you know, people who are greedy hang out with other people who are greedy. And so therefore, you know, 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, you know, that I think it was Jim Rowan who came up with that particular phrase that you mentioned, you are the average of the five or six people you hang around with.
Yeah, 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 a change 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? And so they avoid the mistakes that you make or I make or someone else makes. And they fast track their life to years ahead. So what, what do you think is a great leader in that aspect, John?
Well, Harry, I mean, first of all, I've never made a mistake, so I don't, I don't know what that would be like.
My, my, my favorite, 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, I pause, I don't know, I accept the mistake I made in 1992. And that mistake was that I thought I had made a mistake. So anyway, um, yeah, look, I, I think the 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, 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, canister maker or Prime Minister of England, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give up. And it's a, it's a very, very good piece of advice. And look, again, you can love or hate Donald Trump. I mean, you know, like he's, there's 50% of people in America hate him and there's 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 certain extent, and I wanna go to your story with that aspect.
It's, 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.
You know, it was, I've got six millennials, and only last night, we went out to dinner with one of them, he's just turned twenty-seven 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, Uh, make a choice, uh, do ten years in jail or do a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. I would take the ten years in jail, alright, so anyway, I've got no attention span, right?
And I cross words, I cannot get involved in anything like that that involves concentration. I am not the person for that particular, you know, dining room table. So anyway, well, we gave, we gave this jigsaw puzzle. It was a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, uh, of the Yellow Submarine, the Beatles, okay? And, uh, he just looked at me with a wry grin and said, yeah, I, Dan, I bet you you'd never bought this. I said, no, your mother did, right? Um, but yeah, look, I, I guess my best, I mean, there's, we've been on the roller coaster ride. And Harry, you know, 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. Uh, it's not a merry-go-round. Uh, if you want a merry-go-round, just go and get a job.
And, uh, 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 yards, but the biggest one was, uh, twenty something years ago. Uh, I had a business with twenty odd staff. It was called Dynamic Ideas, uh, meaning that it was a, you know, an advertising business. And, uh, someone who was working for me at the time, when I went over to America to, 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, and, you know, Beauty and the Beast. And we would do posters and books and stickers and card, trading cards and all sorts of things. And when I was away, uh, he was printing one of the bubble gum card series that we had.
And, uh, he made a big printing mistake and we lost two point two million dollars in a week. And, um, consequently lost our house and, you know, everything that goes with it. So therefore, uh, we were down and out and, uh, my staff was twenty, got cut down to, you know, 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, it's our version of Gridiron. And as it turned out, uh, there was five companies pitching for the license to produce these trading cards. And I annoyed. The daylights out of the guy in at the rugby league, you know, home office, just ringing him every day to ask, you know, we put our proposal in.
But so for other companies and we were just a smidgen, you know, just a very small company compared to the other companies were pitching for this license. And I knew if I got it, we'd make the money back. Uh, and I said to the bank, look, can you keep me open till the end of the month? Because they reckon I'll make the decision on who to give the license to by the end of the month. They said, yep, we're gonna lock the doors at the end of the month. Harry, ten 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, on one condition. And I said, what's that? 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, you know, day after day after day. He's a great friend now and he was being sarcastic, of course. He just said, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, promote the trading cards through newspapers and on the TV football shows and all sorts of things. And we made that whole two point two million dollars back in one football season. And we got back on our feet and, you know, put a house, you know, put a roof under the kids, um, sort of, put a roof on the 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 feel, I bet there's, there's more sides to the story. So we're 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? Um, would you like to show some insights on that side of the story?
Uh, wonderful, Harry, just, just absolutely wonderful. Um, and yeah, the kids at that age were probably too young, uh, to know what was going on. Uh, except you wouldn't believe it, Harry, you know, when you're on a down cycle, just everything keeps on, you know, keeps on happening. And you think to yourself, goodness me, how long am I gonna hang in there for this cycle to break? And the day that we left our house, we had a fourteen acre property in the country about two hours north of Sydney. It was a beautiful property. It was a lovely house and it was a guest house with a log cabin and a tennis court and little golf greens and it was just, it was something out of Disney World. And we'd 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, Mother's Day. So I had lost the house for the family on Mother's Day. And as we're driving out of the driveway of this property, I remember I just glanced across at my wife Gail and she was hiding it, but there was tears running down her face and I felt pretty low. And the reason I felt particularly low is because Gail, 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 rollercoaster ride, not because her father was necessarily an entrepreneur, he was a very well-paid accountant, but he was a gambler. And so therefore he, 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, and when we got the licence to do the trading cards for the football code, you know, within twelve 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, there was 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 and you get up at five. Because, you know, you have no choice. And they, they said to me, and that's what happened, I said, absolutely, and I'm sure
it's for the case for everyone else who's been through one of these kicking the guts. You just go to bed late, get up early.
Thank you for sharing that. That was a very authentic and I think it was pretty close to your heart that you shared that with me. So I thank you honestly and 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 were only, you know, five or six at the time, a couple of them. We had six children, but we only had two at the time. And I was dropping them off at the little Saint 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 seatbelt on, but a police car behind me saw that I was just putting it on as I was leaving the curb. And gets what he pulls me over and books me, of course, for not having a seatbelt 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 chaperoned them into the classroom and the Catholic church is just next door. I thought I'll go in and say a prayer. And guess what? I get to the front door of the church, it's locked. This is like at eight thirty 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 to say a prayer and also steal some money from the ball box. So anyway, he opens up and I go in and I just said a prayer to the guy upstairs and said, look, you know, 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 a 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 had 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, you know, 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 and we'll have more and more engagement as well when 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.
Page updated November 13, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
