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Welcome to the Impact Podcast. I'm Eddie Wilson, here to help you visualize what others cannot see, create opportunities where others have failed, and push you to build empires where once there was empty space. Let's embark on this journey together and make a difference in this world. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Impact Podcast with Eddie Wilson. This will be somewhat of a year in review as we come to the end of the year and really excited about what has happened this year specific to the nonprofit Impact Others. And I want to tell you a little bit of a story, and then we'll give you a couple of principles that as you go into the new year, you can use to extend into your company, your purpose, and really trying to find fulfillment in your life, in your company, in everything that you do. So let's go back to the country of Colombia. This year. I took a group of people, as I always do, to different places around the world to either meet some of the orphans and feeding centers that we've put together or to launch one. And this story was actually the launch of a brand new feeding center and the potential orphanage in Colombia. This is something that our community raised money for. Our aspire community raised the money for this orphanage. So it was really awesome opportunity. And then we took probably close to 8 to 10 people with us to Colombia. And as we were sitting there and understand this is probably our 27th orphanage that we've been building around the world. We feed and educate somewhere around 5,300 children a day through Impact Others. And so not anything new going on, but something new in the country of Colombia. Very, very difficult area outside of the area of Bucaramanga and a place called Cafe Madrid, which is really forgotten, you know, out of the way place that the government has kind of sanctioned as a place where refugees and others can just congregate. And it's become a place of drugs, it's become a place of trafficking. It's become a very, very, very difficult place. And so we decided to put what we were calling a house of refuge there was. And so we purchased the property there, we had enough money to renovate it, and then began to see about 50 children twice a day there in that area to start supporting them. Was we were there, we took the people that had donated to it and was sitting there at dinner one night and someone asked me the question, why orphans? And. And I've told this story a little bit, but I want to just recap it a little bit because, you know, sometimes in our life we don't Know why we do what we do, we just. We just do it. It's a natural part of who we are. And sometimes it's driven by emotion, sometimes it's driven by tactic. But this is one of those things that in my life, you know, I had thought about, but it really wasn't something that I thought deeply about. I knew that I had a drive and I was very mission oriented towards helping children and that couldn't help themselves. And really that came as a story of being in Honduras and seeing a need and filling a need, and then feeling fulfillment overfilling that need. And then it just snowballed into more and more and more. But I never really asked myself the deep question, why? Why orphans? You know, like, there's a million different places, you know, whether it's hunger or it's clean water, you know, it's. It's all the different things that you could help somebody with. But for some reason, I was really attached to orphans and to children that really had no one to stand in their place and began to explore that. And a lady by the name of Kim Bowman was one of our members who was on that trip that really stoked that inside of me and really began to think through that process of why, why orphans? And if you know my story at all, I grew up in a home that had quite a bit of loss. Loss my sister at a young age. And then my brother was diagnosed with a very rare disease. And in that diagnosis, he essentially was fairly normal in his progression in life and then was going to digress back to a place where he really couldn't do anything for him before he passed away. That diagnosis came when he was three or four years old and. And then, you know, at six or seven, he began to really digress. And then at 18, he passed away. But from about five years old and on, my brother was confined to a wheelchair. He then lost his ability to feed himself. He lost his ability to really speak. He lost his ability to take care of himself in any other way. And my parents began to become. They became the ultimate caregiver for my brother. And watching a little boy as I grew up and watching Dakota and the whole world, it was like he was the cutest little kid and he was so loved and people would approach him. And then all of a sudden, it's like as he began to go through difficulties in life, it went from the world receiving Dakota to the world really rejecting Dakota. As he began to struggle with communication or struggle and had to. Couldn't function or walk. He had to Sit in a wheelchair as he, you know, later on in life, had a feeding tube. And he had all these things that, you know, are difficult sometimes for. For the average person to watch or to go through. And I watched the whole world love my brother. And then I seemingly, in my mind, would watch the thousands of stares. Whether we were at a concert or we were at a grocery store. You'd see the stares of people that just didn't understand, the stares of people who maybe didn't have a taste or they had almost like a disdain for somebody who was in their space. That was different. And as a young boy, watching that, watching the world love my brother and then watch them reject my brother, it put inside of me some deep, deep desire and need to protect those who do not have protection, who don't have someone to stand up for themselves, for somebody to stand up on their behalf. And as I began on that trip to explore that, it began to really. It began to speak to me and it began to really tell the story and help me understand why I chose orphans or why we choose to do clean water projects in villages that haven't had clean water in thousands of years, or why we build businesses for people who would never, ever have the chance to have a business in this world. And it really comes down to that, that there's a deep need to help, to protect, to stand in on behalf of someone else who maybe couldn't. Someone couldn't stand on behalf of them. And as I was exploring that with Kim, Kim challenged me. She said, why don't you do something in commemoration for your brother? Have you ever done anything in commemoration for him? And I said, no. I said I had never really thought that deeply about those things. And she challenged me, and we began to talk about what time of year, what is it that really is the time of year that most kids are forgotten? These children that do not have representation are forgotten. We began to talk about Christmas and how the whole world gets to experience Christmas and gifts and family and relationship and how these children oftentimes are the forgotten. And many of them know what Christmas is, but never experience Christmas. They don't have someone to come and give them a gift. They don't wake up on Christmas morning with anticipation of a great day and gifts and celebration. They just know that there's a celebration that goes on around the world that they're just not a part of. And. And that's not. That's not necessarily something that is shocking to them. The whole world is something that they're just not a Part of they don't have parents. They don't have someone to care for them, to love them, and. And in these orphanages, they're. They're experiencing love maybe for the first time, and they're experiencing someone to care for them for the first time. And Kim challenged me to maybe provide Christmas for some orphans this year. And so what we decided to do is I decided to create a project called Project Dakota. And Project Dakota was my way of commemorating my brother's life, commemorating the extraordinary effort that my parents went through and giving him an amazing life. It was about commemorating even my own feelings and healing journey of overcoming maybe some of that past hurt of watching the world receive my brother and then the world reject my brother. And we decided to, by faith, step out and essentially give Christmas morning to as many orphans as we could. We put this in front of our community, the Aspire community, and the Aspire community fell in love with this concept, and we decided to raise enough money to give Christmas morning to as many orphans as we could. We reached out to all of our partners. You know, again, I was saying that we feed and educate about 5,300 kids, but that's not all the kids that are in the area. That's just all that we have the resources to feed and educate on a daily basis. So we reached out to all our regional partners, and we have regional partners all around the world that do the work, as we fund the work, and found out that there's around 17,000 orphans that really touch any of our ministry or any of our work that we do. And decided to raise enough money to give Christmas morning to 17,000 orphans around the world and began to do that this year, and it actually scaled. I think that we're going to be closer to 20,000 orphans that we've given Christmas to. But then, you know, decided to organize toy drives around the United States. I think we had 13 toy drives for children that were less fortunate here in the United States. And it really began to take on a life of its own. And for me, has really instilled in me and welled me up with so much purpose and gratitude this holiday season. Because, you know, there's something about, especially when you're tied intrinsically to faith, that this time of year represents life. It represents a gift that you couldn't be. You couldn't get for yourself. It represents a hope. It represents a hope for the world. It represents so many things. And to be able to commemorate my brother in a way of bringing Christmas morning and the Christmas story to thousands and thousands of orphans around the world has been amazing. So I want to fast forward to the chance that I got. I. We took a lot of people around the world to do the Christmas morning and I had the chance to go to India and India is a very, very difficult place. We are in the area of Madurai and we have different locations around India, Trichy and Hyderabad and various other places. But I went to Madurai because I had actually never been. I had supported our partner there for years. We have a television broadcast there. We have quite a few orphans and feeding centers there and have started businesses there. And so I went for the first time to really see these children. And during my three days that I was there, I was only there for three days. We gave Christmas morning to somewhere between 12 and 1500 children. And as we began to pass out the gifts, we told the Christmas story. We told them how much we loved them. We told them of. Of the hope that we were bringing to them and the good tidings. And they told a little bit about my brother there. They told a little bit of the story of why it was called Project Dakota. And then we gave Christmas morning to all these children, right? We, we. And then one evening there was one outerlying village. We decided to do the Christmas celebration in the evening and we got there a little bit late. It was dark outside. As you can imagine, this is a rural part of India. But these villages, they call them villages, but this village probably has 20,000 people in it. It's not a small amount of people. It's a village very, you know, lacks. This village specifically lacks running water. We need to do a clean water project here. There's a little feeding center that was built, a little block building that was built there and off the beaten path. And so we came around the corner and the lights were all on and they had little Christmas lights on the outside of it. And we pulled up and when we got inside there was a couple hundred children in there and that they had been feeding for close to two years now. And. And we began to tell the story and it was pretty awesome. You know, like it was. It was difficult to watch these children who you knew were street kids and the Thomas who's our. Our. Our person there on the ground, him and all the people around there, they had raised money on their own to give these children a Christmas outfit. And so all these kids were just dressed up the best that they could and look little girls with dresses on and boys with button down shirts and just looking sharp and they had fed them by the time that I'd got there, they had already eaten and spent some time. And they had a man stand there telling the story, and they're all sitting on the ground, and he's telling the story, and he's telling the story of Christmas, and he's telling the story, and he's very animated, he's very funny, and the kids are enjoying it, and he's in her. He's interweaving songs, and he's interweaving them, giving him feedback, and he's talking about the Christmas story. And. And as we began to kind of walk down that path, we ended up now giving out the gifts. So I had the privilege of standing there and giving a child every gift. And every child had a little card that had a little number on it, and they were all numbered. And they would come give their number, and I would give them their. And they. We. The way that we did it this time, so that it was more practical, we had plastic boxes, like Tupperware boxes, and inside of it, it had some toys, it had some clothes. It had a blanket in there because so many of them get cold at night. It had some food, it had some treats in there. And then it had some practical things like pencils and pens and stuff like that that many of them just don't get. And we put together just a really great box of stuff that these children love. They thought it was the greatest thing ever. Many of them expressed that they had never, ever had a gift in their entire life. Many of them have heard of Christmas, and they didn't understand Christmas, and they didn't know why people gave gifts. But one of the most special moments of that was at the end of the night. It started. It's dark outside. The lights are dimming a little. And. And most of their songs, I could not understand. I couldn't understand. You know, they had. It's. It's very Indian. I don't even know how to, like, explain the music, but I didn't understand the music that they were singing, and it didn't sound familiar at all. And as we came to the end of the night, we passed all the gifts. The kids were sitting around, they're going through it, they're talking, they're excited. And the guy that told the story, he said. He said, can I sing last? One last song? And I want you to tell me, do you recognize it? And he began to sing this song, Silent Night, with the children. And he said he had taught them Silent Night. He had explained to them what the meaning of the words were. And I began to just sit there and listen to the words of Silent Night, you know, as you know it. I mean, many of you have heard that song your entire life, but there's just something different about watching orphans who had never been cared for before in that way sing Silent night Silent night Holy night All is calm all is bright and you just wondered, how many times in their life have they ever received something that gave them hope or gave them. Gave them the feeling or the thought that tomorrow is going to be a better day than today? And that's what Project Dakota is all about. It was about trying to bring that feeling to children around the world, that today, because of who you are and because somebody cares for you, it gives you hope that tomorrow is going to be a better day, that tomorrow is not going to be like yesterday or the days before, where no one was there for you and no one cared for you and no one showed up for you. But tomorrow is going to be a day where somebody does show up for you. When someone does love you, when. When there is going to be somebody in the world that stands up on your behalf because you are worthy and you are loved. And I was so moved by listening to the children sing Silent Night and watching them. Them with their gifts. It's one of those things that I don't know that I'll ever be the same because of that experience. And for me, I just wanted to give you an update on that. You know, it's like, as we go through this world, so much of our life and our pursuit is tied to things that just don't matter. A lot of the podcasts that I teach on, I teach a lot about the philosophical side. I teach about philosophy of business or growth or building an empire. But I think that for you, I want to challenge you. This Christmas, this holiday season, this end of the year of what are you doing? What are you doing that actually matters, that has intrinsic value to this world? And I want to give you three just quick points today as you end out your year, as you begin to think about next year, as I really got back on the plane after India, which was just last week, I wrote down three things that I want to share with you. The first thing that I wrote down is this. I wrote down, in my life, I want direction over distraction. What I said is, his impact isn't scattered effort. Impact isn't just hoping that today, whatever comes into my life, I can sow into somebody in a positive way. It's a strategic movement. It was a Moment of sitting there in clarity, understanding what I could do to make an impact on orphans around the world and then choosing a path and then organizing that path and then executing on that path. Focus isn't just about saying yes to the right things. It's about saying no to everything else. What is it in your life that you want to create impact on or for or with? And does your business and does the pursuit of your life, the professional pursuits of your life, does it point to that such thing? Impact isn't a scattered effort. I want direction over distraction. Number two, I wrote this. I don't want to build something that lasts one year. I don't want to have just one project. Dakota, I wrote I want to build what outlives me. Impact is measured in legacy, not in likes. It's not about how many people see these orphans being fed or educated or Christmas gifts this Christmas. It's not about how many likes did we get on social media. Did the world see that, see what we did? It was how many children did we impact and do we have the ability to continue to sustain that impact over time? Impact in one day will easily go away. It just becomes a memory. It becomes something that's. That's lodged in a child's memory. But if you show up every single day for that child, it becomes a way of life. Impact is measured in legacy, not in likes. Build what outlives me. And number three, depth before width. It's so easy to just spread your purpose across many things because in the pursuit of width, in the pursuit of bigness or greatness, oftentimes it's easy to rest in these shallow feelings and shallow concerns. And in our lives, we need to go into a level of depth that makes impact on other people. True impact starts beneath the surface with alignment, character, and purpose. Without depth, our growth will collapse under pressure. So three things I wrote as I came back that I'm going to incorporate and instill and make sure that my businesses, my corporations in 2026 have purpose aligned with them. But purpose that is intentional. And the three things are direction over distraction, build what outlives me, and depth. Before with. As you go into the new year and you do your annual planning, I want you to consider this, that this could be a great year of impact for you. And to the degree that you create impact, you'll also create fulfillment. Business is not about being successful. It's about being successful and also feeling the success that you've created. And the only way to do that is through impacting others. Number one, I want you to think about how to impact your employees. How do you impact your employees? Are you instilling inside of them greatness? Are you giving them a path towards success and a future that makes life better for others? Number two, are you making an impact on your customers or your community that you serve at large? Is there a greater impact that's being sown into them? Are you just doing business or are you doing business with a purpose? And lastly, number three, who are you making impact on, right? Not just your employees, not just your customers, but the world at large, the greater population that needs someone else to stand on their behalf. So as you go into the next year, I want to make that encouraging suggestion to you and I hope that 2026 will become a year of impact. Thank you so much for being a part of the Impact podcast this past year. It's been the privilege of a lifetime to be able to bring to you content to help you grow. But most importantly, I hope that you will grow in this place of impact. Thanks so much for being a part of the podcast and for listening today. Love to connect with you further. And you can connect with me on social media at Eddie Wilson official on any of the social media channels.