Simon Cowell appeared on the Diary of a CEO podcast and opened up about the “hardest thing that ever happened” to him: losing his parents.
“I can sit here honestly – everyone says, when you lose them, in time it’ll get better. You think, ‘No it won’t.’ The truth is, it does, as long as you believe, and you have to believe that their presence is still there with you.”
Learning that perspective took time for Cowell. “I think particularly when I lost my mum, I was on a downward spiral at that point,” he said on the podcast. “I lost everyone, you know, I’ve lost my parents. It’s finality now. What I said about the material things I’ve got, everything just meant nothing at that point.”
He added, “It was almost like because of the loss I’d had, I’ve got to find something else to fill it. And it was, ‘I’m just going to be a ridiculous workaholic,’ and I was very successful but I wasn’t happy, I really, really wasn’t happy.”
What led him on the path to happiness again was the birth of his son, Eric, in 2014. Healing for Cowell started the second his fiancée, Lauren Silverman, broke the news that the couple was expecting.
“When I got the call from Lauren, which starts, any call that starts with, ‘Are you sitting down?’ You know what‘s coming next. It was like, ‘Are you sitting down?’ ‘Yes,’ ‘Well,’ and she told me. And yes it did absolutely change, it changed everything in my life. It made me happy again,” Cowell said.
The America’s Got Talent Judge and executive prouder went as far as to say having Eric saved him “without question.”
“I really really had reached the point where nothing matters,” he said. “I almost can’t even remember everything from that period. It hit me so hard.”
What Cowell sees clear as day now is how he’s showing Eric the love his parents showed him.
“t’s how I feel for Eric, just that pure love,” he said. “They just want the best for you and in return, you feel the same about them. It’s how I feel about Eric. Everything starts to come full circle.”
