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Happy Living | Blog | Something Significant: Todd White, Dry Farm Wines Pt.1“The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.”
(Lao Tzu)

A few months ago, I met a man known as “the healthiest wino on the planet.” His name is Todd White, and we met at an evening event during this year’s Paleo f(x) conference, at which his company was serving sugar-free, natural wines. As we chatted, I felt a warm connection with him. He must have felt it too, because when we spoke again after the conference he said, “You know, it wasn’t an accident that we met.”

Clearly, like me, Todd believes that the Power of the Universe[1] brings opportunity to us…often through the people we meet seemingly by chance.

In the five months since we’ve met, I’ve joined Todd’s company’s wine club and stopped buying toxic wine at my local grocer. I now have a steady flow of healthy, Dry Farm Wines automatically delivered to my doorstep every month (join the club here). Dry Farm Wines has become the official wine of Happy Living, and if you’re eager to try it, you can get your first bottle for a penny by clicking here.

Recently, Todd and I co-hosted A Happy Hour of Blog Theatre™, Wines, Fun, and Friendship at the World Domination Summit in Portland (watch a video recap here), and on September 29th, we’ll be together in Sacramento, co-hosting the first ever Happy Living Presents a Night of Theatre, Wines & Books! If you’re in Sacramento, get your tickets here!

As my relationship with Todd and his company has grown over these past months, I’ve learned that Dry Farm Wines creates the absolute best wines available because only goodness and love are allowed in their bottles. Similarly, Todd White is his absolute best self because he only allows goodness and love into his life, and he shares love and joy with everyone he meets. He’s an inspiration to me, and I am very proud to introduce him to you in Part 1 of his Something Significant interview.

Hi Todd, please tell us a little about yourself and how you got where you are today.

Hi Matt. I’m so happy to be here today and to share some knowledge with your readers.

Well, I’ve been creating value and services my whole life. I’ve been self-employed since I was seventeen, and I’ve started about ten companies. Most have been reasonably successful. A couple of them were minor failures and one was a grand failure. Two created pretty significant financial exits for me.

I have been creating value in the world, and I think that’s the best way to create success. Now, I’m in the wine business—selling healthy wines to thousands and thousands of people across the United States.

How has significance played a role in your journey? (My philosophy on significance[2] has two components: Doing something you love and creating something of value to others.)

I have a very deep passion around health, bio-hacking, fitness, and helping people live a better, healthier life. And I love drinking delicious wines. I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing than exactly what I am doing right now. But more importantly than just selling natural wines, I’m building an organization I love too.

You know, I’ve created businesses in the past, in some ways, for the wrong reasons. Usually, it was in pursuit of an opportunity that I viewed as having the potential for a significant financial exit for me. I was living a life of expectation. I built organizations with lots of people working for me, expecting them to achieve a financial goal that would eventually lead to my exit.

Today, my philosophy of creating a successful business is very different; it’s based on appreciation and love. We call the Dry Farm Wines organization ‘our family,’ and we’re building a business that we never want to sell. We’ve designed the organization itself to be deeply satisfying for the participants, each of whom view their role as a lifetime endeavor. Building a business on the principle of appreciation has created so much value in terms of the relationships we have, both within our family and with our customers.

And that brings me to the second part of your philosophy of significance: creating something of value to others. We sell ‘health food in a bottle.’ We sell healthy wine. And that creates a tremendous amount of value for our customers.

I really think the greatest value that I create today is providing leadership to my work family and structuring our company in such a way that it brings significant value to the life of each and every member.

Was there a specific moment or situation when you became aware of those things that are most significant to you?

Yes. I had a terrible business failure just before I started Dry Farm Wines. This wine business has just been an amazing success. Last year alone, our revenue grew 100X, that’s not a 100% increase, it’s one hundred times more revenue than the prior year. I owe that success to the failure of my last business.

What I learned most about in my last business was the importance of finding the right people. People define everything in your life. I also learned to live my life with appreciation instead of expectation, finding gratitude everyday. Experiencing the profound effects of meditation has led me to the business practices we have today with Dry Farm Wines. But these lessons did not come easily.

In my failure, in that darkness, I took it very personally. I lost a lot of money, and I lost money of friends of mine who had invested with me. It was the first time in my life I had experienced any kind of profound public failure.

It turned out to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me, but at the time, I was in a very dark place. I was in my fifties and had failed grandly, and I got in such a dark hole that I just couldn’t see out of it, at all. Of course, I have failed before. Any entrepreneur knows that when you’re building businesses, you spend a lifetime failing. But this failure was so profoundly personal that I went into deep grieving, into shame. Guilt about doing something you regret is one thing, but shame is about what you think you are. I was paralyzed with shame and grief for months. I hardly ever left the house other than to go out for food. About all I was able to do was to listen to podcasts, read books, and try to heal. I was deeply depressed.

So I was in this dark, dark space when I heard this podcast: Arnold Schwarzenegger being interviewed by Tim Ferris[3]. During the interview, Arnold described how meditation had changed his life. I was at my ‘rope’s end’ and willing to try anything, so I tried meditation right then – that morning – and I had immediate benefit from it. I continued meditating twice a day for a couple of months. And profound things started to happen to me. From that, I started a whole bunch of other healthy practices and affirmations. When I was able to slow down the trauma of my depressed thinking and focus on my right values, that’s when I began attracting things aligned with those right values into my life. That’s when I started replacing expectation with appreciation. That’s when I started finding joy.

You know, fear cannot exist in the presence of love, and anxiety cannot exist in the presence of gratitude. Darkness cannot exist in the presence of light. So, meditation started enabling me to live my right values in a very earnest way, because it slowed down the chatter of the egoic-mind, which is a constant enemy. So, becoming aware of the egoic-mind and slowing down its incessant chatter, replacing the ego’s expectation with appreciation from the heart–I think that is when you start to find your true values in life, Matt. It’s what you call the Power of the Heart.[4]

When I started projecting the frequency of joy and love into the universe, I realized how I was going to spend the rest of my life. And then everything began to change.


Dear reader, I hope you are enjoying my interview with Todd. It was originally scheduled to be a Something Significant Podcast, but the audio quality wasn’t up to our standards. In my work to convert our phone conversation to print, Todd had too many important and inspiring things to capture in one post. Stay tuned for Part 2, to be published on October 9, 2017.

In the meantime, follow Todd…

Twitter | Facebook | Website

Part 2

[1] Doing the work unleashes the Power of the Universe.

[2] My Philosophy on Significance and Leaving Your Mark

[3] https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/

[4] Anchoring unleashes the Power of the Heart.

Image via Unsplash | This post may contain affiliate links, which means if you click and then purchase we will receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for reading & supporting Happy Living!

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URL: dryfarmwines.com

Dry Farm Wines curates only the highest quality natural wines from small family farms that meet our strict standard of purity. Unlike today’s commercialized and processed wines, this is real wine. Nothing added, nothing removed.

  • Sugar-Free (< 1g/L)
  • Lower Sulfites (< 75ppm)
  • Lower Alcohol (< 12.5%)
  • Mycotoxin/Mold-Free
  • No Industrial Additives
  • Dry-Farmed (No Irrigation)
  • Minimal Intervention
  • Wild Native Yeast
  • Small Productions
  • Paleo-Friendly
  • Keto-Friendly
  • Low Carb-Friendly
  • Mouthwateringly Delicious
  • Older Vines (generally 35-100 years)
  • Naturally or Biodynamically Farmed

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