The Resilient Mind - Become The CEO of Your Life - Eddie Wilson

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Eddie Wilson is a dynamic entrepreneur and private‑equity investor often dubbed the “King of Exits” for having owned more than 120 companies and successfully exited over 100. He leads a portfolio of companies under his firm (including real‑estate holdings of thousands of units) and built the Empire Operating System — a methodology for scaling businesses. His business philosophy blends growth and purpose, and through his nonprofit efforts he channels profit into global impact and giving back. With a mission of empowering leaders, he shows how to use business as a force for good while building wealth and legacy.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_JournalThis episode is brought to you in partnership with Motiversity Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to become the CEO of your life with Eddie Wilson. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. First big failure in business selling a company, leaving so much money on the table being taken advantage of. I determined that wasn't going to be me, right? That was just a small blip on the radar. I'm going to go fix that.

And now it's catapulted me to massive success in that area. These three teammates you need in your life, and it's not the people that you would expect. Typically, when I'm teaching business, I give you functions and I give you job descriptions. Today, I give you personality types, and I give you things that they absolutely have to accomplish and champion for you to have success in your business. There are three people that you absolutely need in your life, in your business, in order to gain success. So first of all, let's just go back to the person who's driving culture.

culture is the very heart of the business. It's the why. It's why are we actually doing this? What is the purpose of it, right? And so in every thriving venture, you have to have somebody who's driving the why. You have to have somebody who has it in front of them. If you think about it in my organization, many of you've heard the podcast now for many episodes, and I have a private equity firm called Collective Influence. for me, I am driving culture, and that's really my responsibility. The CEO oftentimes I need to drive culture. The main purposes of a CEO are to number one know their numbers. Number two, know their people, and number three, have all the big relationships.

That's the purpose and the role of a CEO. You have to have somebody who focuses on the how, right? This is Alex for accountability. Someone in your organization has to essentially beat the drum of accountability every day. Oftentimes, that's typically either your finance person or your operations person, and then it trickles down. But you have to have a champion, right? Like, you could have have lots of people in your organization that adhere to your culture or drive culture, but you have to have a champion of culture. You have to have somebody that is driving it, right?

Next, you have to have somebody that is driving accountability. Who is holding all parties responsible? Who's pulling data up to say, we said we were going to do this, but we didn't do this? Where is the accountability coming from? Who is driving culture? And then lastly, when you think about Danny and Danny's the driver, right? Danny's execution. And you have to have somebody who understands and focuses on the now. You have to have somebody that's like,

I understand that we're dreaming about this tomorrow, but what happens today? Where do we put feet to this plan and action to this plan? When we work together, you can essentially do, anything, right? And you do it with the right efficiency and productivity. And so when you think about these three people, I want you to look in your life and think about anything you're trying to accomplish, whether it's something personal, whether it's something professional, do you have these three people present? When I say those words, do people pop into your head? You have to have

role players. In your business, you have to have role players, in your life you have to have players and you should be looking to see where or what area do you have proclivity every person if your human fails right it's impossible to go through life without failure if you're thinking through like whatever failures you've had business relationships sports you know whatever it is you began to look at it and based on your perception of that failure it began to seat inside of your subconscious and the way that it seats inside of your subconscious means that you either reject it and you move away from that failure, you learn from it, you grow, you don't fail again, or you begin to perfect, or it becomes a part of who you are. It's your character. It's now your

ceiling. It is your identity. And so if we look at our failure and we go from failure to failure, and we look at that failure with the right perspective, this is just a moment in time. It's not who I am. It allows our subconscious to kind of release it and say, this is not my identity. So therefore, I don't have to continue in this path. The greatest failure is not attempting whatever it is that you believe you're called or you desire to do. When you, an experience like what you perceive as a failure, walk me through, like, what are the steps you do? Sure. Yeah.

So the systematic steps that I go through are number one, accepting that it was failure. I think that it's a misnomer to just say there are no failures in life. They're just teaching lessons. Not there are failures, right? Like there are things when things don't go right. Like there's investments that go bad, right? Like and I like the positivity and the spin on like, well, that investment, so I lost a million dollars. Oh, it was a million dollar, you know, educational lesson.

I don't think that's, I don't think that that is helpful at all. I think oftentimes looking at it and going, no, no, that was failure. It didn't go right. That investment did not go the way I wanted it to. And that's okay because it's not going to define me. I'm going to continue to go down this path. if I believe that it's the right path, and the outcomes I'm going to allow to take care of themselves. I can gradually get better to begin to, I can, you know, start to help supplement the outcome

or begin to create a different or better outcome based on the decisions I'm making as I go down down that pathway. So for me, it's very much about like identifying the failure, agreeing with it. It is failure. It didn't go the way I wanted it to. Then, making that determination that that failure isn't going to define me, and then beginning to take the next right action, right? Like life is all about taking the next right action, the next right choice, right? So many times we get so locked into what am I going to do in 20 years,

how am I going to get to this great, grandiose, amazing thing in my life? How do I live a life of purpose? How you live a life of purpose is whatever the next right choice, the next right action your life is, it's being purposeful and making that. A lot of the things began to eliminate. and take care of themselves. What are some of the reasons people act so adversely to failure?

I think it goes back to this human desire to put a facade above perfection. If I live in true authenticity, I am flawed. Like, I do have failures. I do have things that I'm not proud of. That I don't like that I want to get better. And I think the quickest way to overcome those. things in our life that we want to overcome, it's about being authentic and it's about taking down the veneer. People just don't want to be in failure because they don't want the shame of failure because they really want to keep the veneer up that they're perfect, that they have it all together.

But in that, that's the greatest roadblock to actually finding success. The greatest catalyst of success is looking at that failure in the mirror. Then you naturally can either accept it or you can do something about it. you have to get okay with what you're good at and what you're not good at. I think one of the most detrimental things you could do is ask yourself, what do I bring good into the world and say nothing, right? And I think so many people feel that way. If you had to do one thing every day with failure, it would be to chronicle them. You know, we don't want to live there.

We don't want them. But we need a place where those failures exist. Some of us are so predetermined to just like move on. and forget about the failure. Those failures are great lessons, but also it allows us to make sure we're not identifying with them long term. I think it's important that we daily, weekly, monthly,

chronicle those failures along with our successes. And I think that in that we can make the right choice about how we're going to perceive it and how it's going to see it inside of our lives. I go through an exercise every year now where I actually toggle, I'll use the app called tag where I toggle a lot of my time. And at the end of the year,

I give that to my CFO, and we look at my active income based on the time I exchanged. Like, this is what every minute of your life was worth last year. This is what you exchanged it for. And for me, then I'm constantly dialing that in every single year. I know it's a little crazy, but it's like, for me, what it does is it gets me into this place where I'm really hyper-focused on what I exchanged my time for.

One of the greatest lessons I've learned is to really understand who I am, not in kind of my conscious self, but trying to understand who I am in my my subconscious self. You know, in our conscious brain, we're making seven decisions a minute, but in our subconscious brain, it's 10,000 or 20,000. No,

it's like making all these decisions based on our subconscious mind, the thing that we're unaware of. And typically our subconscious is tied to traumas. It's tied to fears. It's tied to all these things. And I think that if we're not getting the outcome we want, I think we have to stop looking at the activity of our day. and we have to look at the activity of our life, right?

Like there are patterns in our life. Sometimes you just need an honest friend or mentor that's going to say, okay, let me show you this pattern that maybe you don't see. Because it's in the breaking of those patterns that we actually get the success we want. Really number two is that oftentimes the things you chase elude you. And so if you chase the right thing, you ultimately get what you ultimately want.

I wrote a book a few years ago called Time, wealth and purpose. I didn't start with purpose. I actually started with time because most oftentimes what you ultimately want is a result of actually just managing your time properly. If time is my most valuable asset, I should spend more time managing my time than managing my money. For me, the principle of getting what I want out of my life is a time-based principle, not a wealth-based principle. If you chase wealth, it eludes you. If you chase time, wealth oftentimes is the byproduct of it. So I rarely look at my world as the wealth or the achievement or the goals,

but I look at my world as in these like micro, these pieces of micro time that I will exchange for something that I want something in return for. And that would be the second thing I say, I would say to a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business people, people that are pursuing, you know, maybe they're in a W-2 job. And it's like, you know, in the end, it's so important that, you manage your time. I know that's cliche, but I will tell you that to the degree that I manage

my time, everything else comes into purview. So what I'm doing is I'm constantly looking at my motives and my action determining like, am I passionally pursuing something because that's a love based activity or am I actually avoiding something? I don't want the liability. I don't want whatever it is. And then identifying and then you go, okay, okay, that's fear. And then let's actually like reason through that, you know, like, um, and then it goes back to what, what should we be afraid of? Like there are really a few things in life that we should be afraid of. And most of it, actually the things that we're afraid of and we imagine in our mind, actually if we went through them would better us, right? Like it might be painful, but it's about having the great,

a decent relationship with your, but I think you have to understand what, what you do it, you know, in your daily activities and it's being conscious enough, um, to look at what you do and determine, am I avoiding something or are I running to something? That's where purpose, mission, and all this stuff that acres into it, because if I can kind of stay rooted in purpose, impacting someone else's life,

impacting the lives of those that can't protect themselves, it's like it's a lot easier to kind of like root that fear-based activity out of my life. One of my favorites is Kevin O'Leary. You know, he's on Shark Tank. They call him Mr. Wonderful. He's this rough, grouchy, mean guy, right? Like it's his persona.

And then you get behind the scenes with him and we're talking about life and his passion for whatever it is. You know, like watches, cars, like people. And what I notice is that there's something in common with all of them. And it's, it's, it's, they've got kind of what I would call like the seeker mentality. They have this passion for life and they're all going deep in certain areas. And it's all really random stuff. But most of them have like this personality that's like they go really deep in areas and they're seeking and they're searching and they're always learning and they don't treat people as if they know it all, right? Like the most successful people we have on the stage, the Mark Cubans.

I mean, Mark's multi-billionaire, you know, just exited the Mavericks, made another billion. And it's like the guy is super, super successful. Here's sitting backstage. and he was watching somebody else on the state on our TV in the green room you know we got it publicized back there and we're just chatting he's like hold on a second he's like in listening to the speaker and he's like wow it's really good hold on one second it pulls out it's fun he's like taking a note right it's like he's acting just like me you know like that i was like and i'm always just so enamored by by that in people um and so i think that sometimes their brands kind of

position them as like they've found it all they found all the success you can't help them. You can't interact with them. And the funny thing is, is behind the scenes, they're all students of the game. They're all seeking. They're all learning. They're all passionate. That's what I've learned a lot is that it's okay and it doesn't diminish who you are. You know, that authenticity of always being okay with not knowing something and being passionate to learn and to grow inside of something that it doesn't diminish your brand by showing that you don't know something or that you still haven't achieved something in your life. But actually, it's a blessing at that level because they have access to the people that

can help them achieve it even quicker, you know? Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.