Brian Tracy answers questions about cutting through email clutter with direct contact and phone calls, and moving past difficult moments by accepting responsibility and staying focused on future goals.
36 million
August 10, 2015
December 31, 2025
Hi there. Throughout the year, I've received a lot of questions from my friends on Facebook. So we've decided to sit down and answer these questions and let me give you my thoughts and insights and experiences, and they may be helpful to you. And questions from one person may be a question that you might have asked yourself. So let's get started.
Marissa from Facebook asks, I just launched a website service and I need to cold email companies and organizations to promote it. What is the best way to approach it so that they are more likely to respond positively to my email, if at all?
Well, welcome to the world of email entrepreneurship. And here's what we know. There are 36 million commercial email sites today sending out emails at random to find customers. So now that you've started your website, you are now 36 million and 1. So how do you break through the clutter? And the fact of the matter is that you're probably going to have to pick up the phone and make an appointment and go and get face to face with the prospective customer and talk to them and tell them why your services are superior to those of any other services like yours in the world today. Because today people only buy what they consider to be the one that is better than anything else that's available. It's the best, best choice for them at this moment. And so you're going to have to demonstrate that your services are so excellent that a person who needs the services you offer would be very best served to buy them from you today. Unfortunately, people use the Internet to avoid calling on customers and as a result, they send out emails by the hundreds or the thousands, and people delete them by the hundreds or the thousands or have them swept up by their spam folders. Your job, if you're really serious about getting Internet customers, is you're going to have to make the first contact. Head to head, heart to heart, face to face, voice to voice. If you cannot do that, well, then you should perhaps work for somebody else who is willing to do that. Because other than that, you're competing with 36 million other people who are trying to get the attention of, of the same person that you are.
Marnie from Facebook asks, how do you deal with people in a difficult and awkward situation and not let that situation drain or affect you? How do you stop focusing on or replaying what happened in your mind afterwards and move forward from it?
Well, one of the most important principles for success is not to worry about things that you can't do anything about. And you, you can't do anything about A past event. We say in life there's only three periods of time. There's the past, which you can't change. There's the present, which is a moving point between the past and the future. And then there's the future. One of the things that I learned many, many years ago, which had a profound effect on my thinking, was that since you can't change the past, you can change the future by what you do today. So your actions and your decisions today can change the future. So the answer is just forget about the past. You can't change it, you can't do anything about it. You know that 90% of all unhappiness in our world today and the entire fields of psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy are all based on helping people deal with and talk about things that happened in the past that cannot be changed. So what you find is that self actualizing people, the top 10% of people, think about the future most of the time. They think about their dreams and their goals. Most of the time they think about actions that they can take immediately most of the time. And they get so focused and so busy creating their futures, they don't have time to think about the past. Now one last thing that's been very helpful to me is if you've made a mistake or something has happened in the past that's unfortunate, you can cancel it out by simply saying the magic words, I am responsible. I am responsible. I am responsible. If someone has hurt you or you've had a difficult experience in your childhood, you can say, well, I didn't do anything. Yes, but you're responsible for how you respond. Today a Nobel Prize winning study of the evolution of civilizations came up with the term response. Ability is your ability to respond effectively with the ups and downs and negative events of life is the key measure of your ability to be successful and happy in the future. And what you do is, you say, whenever you feel negative or unhappy about anything, you say, wait a minute, I'm responsible. I'm responsible for my life. I'm responsible for what happens. I can't change the past. So I'm not going to spend a second worrying about the past. I'm going to become so busy working on my future and my goals that I don't have time to think about the past. Now here's a final point. No matter how brilliant your mind is, and your mind can hold thousands of thoughts over time, you can only hold one thought at a time. So if you fill your mind with the thought of one activity that you can do now that moves you towards your future, you simultaneously block out all other thoughts and feelings of anything else that's happened or that is happening to you. So the only antidote for worry or unhappiness is busy, continuous action in the direction of your goals. And whatever you do repeatedly becomes a habit. So if you keep doing this repeatedly, writing down and thinking about your goals and working on them all day long, eventually, like baggage that you dropped out of your car and drove on, those negative events disappear over the horizon of your past and you eventually forget about them completely, as you already have with so many negative events from the past. So good luck. Now, I've given you a couple of ideas, so the most important thing that you can do is to take action. So what one action are you going to take as a result of these key ideas that I've just given you? Whatever it is, jot it down and let me know. Remember, one action that you take that you would not have taken in the absence of this discussion can change your life forever.
