Mindset to Gain Wealth and Improve Success: Interview with Weldon Long
Change Your Mindset, Gain Wealth, and Improve Success
[Doug Staneart] Hey, welcome to High Impact Leaders®. I’m your host Doug Staneart of the Leaders Institute, and our goal is to help you build strong teams while growing a successful business. On this episode, I’m interviewing Weldon Long. He is an inspirational entrepreneur that started his first company in his late thirties and generated 2.5 million in revenue in his first year. The very first year in an industry that he had been in less than six months when he started his company. If you want a few secrets to improving your lot in life pay very, very close attention to the strategies that Weldon gives us.
Rid Your Excuses and Take a Listen
When he mentions his background and how he became a quote-unquote overnight success, he will erase every excuse that you’re making for yourself. If you’re not as successful as you want to be, take a good listen and jot down notes. This covers some of the most valuable content that I think I’ve ever heard in less than 30 minutes. It should be noted, that I have interviewed hundreds of successful people in the last five years, and this is a worthwhile interview. So listen, very closely, and take good notes. Enjoy learning more about Weldon and how you two can increase your success by making just a few minor changes.
Hey, Weldon, and welcome to High Impact Leaders®.
[Weldon Long] Man. I’m super happy to be here, Doug. Thanks for having me, man.
[Doug Staneart] Yeah, so I kind of mentioned in the intro a little bit about your background and before we actually get to that, you’ve got a really interesting story. Can you give me some insight into how you made it? How did you get the concept of becoming an entrepreneur, creating your own world and grow to success? I know now you do a lot of consulting, but that wasn’t your first real success in business though, right?
Beginning Years and What He Built
[Weldon Long] Yeah. So I opened my first company, in 2004. It was a little heating and air conditioning company. I didn’t know much about that industry. I had gotten a job the year before as a salesperson for a small heating and air conditioning company. But man, I realized what a huge opportunity there was in the residential services industry.
So, A year after I got that job in 2004, I opened my own company and really focused on the sales and service process. I don’t know anything about the mechanical side of heating and air conditioning. You know, I tell people, we are a sales and marketing company that happens to sell and install air conditioners and heaters. So I grew that company very quickly. It went from $0 to over five years we did 20 million.
Sales Background Drives to Success
Weldon Long In fact, in 2009, that little company was selected as one of Inc. Magazine’s fastest growing, privately held small companies. Wow! I sold that company in 2010, and around that time I wrote my first book. A little book titled “The Upside of Fear.” That book really had a lot of success. People started calling me after reading that book saying, “Hey, you know, come kind of teach us what you’ve learned about business and the behaviors and thoughts that drive success in business.” So I started doing more consulting and speaking.
Then in 2012, I wrote a book called The Power of Consistency, which hit number five on the New York Times bestsellers list and number two on the Wall Street Journal Best Seller’s List. So that brought in larger clients, like FedEx and Home Depot, kind of household name companies. Couple of years after that, I wrote a book on sales.
With my knowledge of the sales process, I leveraged consistency across everything that I do. Right. The thing I’ve learned is that consistent sales results come from consistent sales activities, random sales results come from random sales activities. It’s not rocket science. It is however some brain science, but you know, it’s about how the thought process works and how those thoughts are kind of transmuted into behaviors and results.
What Pedigree?
[Doug Staneart] Man, there’s probably a ton of people listening right now that are going, “oh yeah. Wow. Listen to how great this guy is.”
“That’s because he’s got everything going for him. Right?”
“He’s probably really smart. Came from a rich family, all that kind of stuff. Right?” In fact, I know you really wanted to kind of start, the interview and our recording with kind of your background. But I wanted people to see where you are now and not where you came from. So tell us a little bit about what was happening just like a year or two prior to getting that sales job.
[Weldon Long] Yeah, I tell people when they think I had a pedigree, I tell ’em I went to jail, not Yale. Right, I went to the state Penn, not Penn State. And we’ll talk about some of that. Actually that first job, selling for that heating and air conditioning company in 2003, is the year I got the job. I was actually living in a homeless shelter because I had just been released from federal and state prison after serving 13 years.
Changing the Script
From 1987 until 2003, in that roughly 16 year span, I spent 13 of those 16 years walking prison yards. I was a ninth grade high school dropout. I was a punk, a knucklehead, and a thug in 2003. I pulled a gun on a guy, that sent me to the penitentiary in Colorado, which is where I live. I did about four and a half years and got paroled back on the streets about 27 years old. Still a ninth-grade high school dropout. Now I’m a convicted felon. So I had kind of started writing this script for myself of this loser. You know, I started kind of believing in myself in terms of that definition.
I went back to the joint again, this time on gun charges and parole violations. I went back for a couple of years. They popped me out again at 30 years old. Now, I’m two time convicted felon a ninth-grade high school dropout, no skills, no education, no trade. No nothing. I got hooked up with some guys doing some sketchy telemarketing and did that for a couple of years. I tell people, I should have seen red flags when they hired me.
At that point in my life, it doesn’t say much about their hiring standards, right? You know, I’d been to the joint. So I did that for a couple of years until one day the feds came in. The feds indicted our group on federal money laundering and mail fraud charges all around telemarketing. So again, I got sentenced, this time to federal penitentiary for seven years.But it was during the last seven years that some things changed, and I kind of had this moment of clarity in my life. That’s when things really begin to turn.
A Wave of Change
[Doug Staneart] So, then what happened? What was the kind of trigger that made you turn your life around? So to speak.
[Weldon Long] Yeah, for me it was a very clear moment in time. June 10th, 1996. I was 32 years old. I had already served about six years in the state of Colorado. Now, just starting seven years in the federal system. On June 10th, my father passed away. I remember hearing the news from a prison guard. He came into the cell house and just told me. I remember the first thought I had was that dad went to his grave with me in prison. He died very young at 59 which is my age now. He was 59 when he passed away. I always thought I would get my act together, be a person my dad could have understood and been proud of. He was a career military guy, so he never really understood my lifestyle. With that realization, I knew I had to change the course of my life.
I had a three-year-old son that I’d abandoned. I had fathered him when I was out on parole and now he was three years old with no father. I just made a decision. Really based on two factors, number one, I was going to become a man that my father would be proud of. And two, I was going to be the father that, that little boy deserved. So, I set out on a journey at that point, reading and studying and learning what successful people do. Just trying to do that instead of the crazy stuff I’d been doing.
The Influences to Change
Doug Staneart So just outta curiosity, how did you do that? Like what kind of things were you reading and I’m assuming you’re still in prison when this is going on, right?
Weldon Long: Oh yeah, I had seven years left to go. Seven years. Over those years, I began to read and study. That resulted in a G E D through a school in Southern California. I got a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in business. The real change for me was in the mindset. It’s funny because when my father passed away on June 10th, about three or four hours later, I kind of made this decision like, “Okay, this is it.” I walked out of my cell down at the end of the cell house. There was a kind of mechanical room or closet type thing down there. Within the closet, there was a big cardboard box and in that box were books. The cops would come in and throw books in this little box. So, I reached in there and started going through desperate to find something.
This Book Changed Me
I stumbled across a classic little book that most of your viewers, listeners, and yourself have probably read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. By Dr. Steven Covey. Yeah, I remember looking at the cover of that book and I’m like, “dang, if I can get like two successful habits,
Rewriting my Own Pathways
Weldon Long I started reading that book. In the introduction of the seven habits, Dr. Covey talks about that, you have the ability to live out of your imagination.The pieces in our brain like human endowments of imagination and conscience and self-discipline. That you don’t have to live out of your past. At 32 years old, I’d already been in prison for six and a half years. So it’s like, I kind of thought this was it. You know that I was living completely outta my past experiences and past decisions. With that, I realized like, “Wow, I can live outta my imagination.”
My Mindset Had to Change
Maybe, I’m holding myself back. I’ve got a very vivid imagination.
All this crazy stuff that if you had seen that list in 1996 you’d have thought I was insane. I was a career criminal, career offender, ninth-grade high school dropout. No experience, no nothing. I took that sheet of paper and I put toothpaste on the back four corners. Then, I stuck it onto the wall in my cell. Over the next seven years, I began to read, meditate, and visualize that list.
Taking the Next Steps
Years later I would understand the neurology and how I was literally changing the neural connectors of my brain writing pathways. Rescripting everything. At that time, I was just desperate. Then, I began to read and study. Like I said, I got some education and seven years later they opened those gates. The gravel crunched under my feet as they let me out to a shelter, a halfway house. I had no place else to go. My father was dead. My mother was back in Louisiana. I wasn’t going to leave Colorado- my son was there.
So I walked the streets of Colorado Springs for six months until I found that job selling air conditioners. I never looked back. I’m just grateful to that industry. It really gave me a shot. Today it’s easy to talk about. Yeah, I could get a job anywhere. Because today I’ve got endorsements from Tony Robbins and Steven Covey. People of that stature and clients that are Fortune 50 companies. Back in those days, I was a ninth-grade high school dropout with some jail education. Walking the streets, trying to find his first job at 39 years old I might add. So I was 39 when I got out.
Doug Staneart That’s fantastic! You really have an incredible story. I think it gives us all hope, you know, because we all have things that are going against us. Though, I don’t think any of us have what you had going against you when you. I doubt any or most of the people have been homeless searching 6 months for their first job. Yet, you did and continued trying to find that first job. That chance somebody would give you despite your record. So basically, you just took away everybody’s excuses listening to this.
A Fresh Start and No Excuses
Weldon Long Well, that’s a lot of the work that I do when I’m working with individuals. Organizations are like, people hung up on a divorce. They had bankruptcy five years ago, that jerky boss three years ago. Whatever it may be. Right, they had all these things affect them still today. You know, they’re angry and resentful. They’re scared to death that someone’s going to find out. My story in conjunction with my teachings does exactly what you mentioned. It just removes their excuses.
People often will come up to me after I speak they’ll say, “Hey, listen, don’t take this the wrong way. I mean, but if you can do it, anybody can.” I’m like is that an insult? That’s the whole point of my story. When I finally met Dr. Covey years later and he endorsed my first book. One of the things he told me with a bowed head and his hand on my heart, he repeated three times. “You have a divine destiny.” I asked him if he was a very spiritual man. “What is that destiny?” He said, “will yourself into this story. You’ve got to share this story. People need to understand how far you’ve fallen.” He continued, “if you’re willing to do the work and abide by the principles that govern success, anybody can become anything they want. That really is the lesson of the story.”
The Turning Point
Doug Staneart So going back, we kind of ended the story where you are a sales guy at the HVAC or selling air conditioning systems. I’m assuming somewhere along the way something happened where you figure out, “my God, I can do this better than these SLS that I’m working for.” And that kind of thought is typically the entrepreneur mindset that kicks in. Even if our experience in that industry equates to six months, a year or whatever it may be. I’m assuming it didn’t go all rosy from the point that you made the decision. But that the decision was probably the change in what happened at that moment that led you to the success you earned.
Reading Became my Experience, My Knowledge
Weldon Long Well, you know, all those years in prison, before I got out that last time, I’d been reading. A lot of what I read was on mindset. I also read sales books, Brian, Tracy and Tom Hopkins. Tom Hopkins became a very dear friend and wrote the foreword to my second book. I’ve learned from those guys through books, right? Since I was in prison by myself, and I didn’t have any practical experience.
Yet, I understood the sales process and I was, you know desperate, right? I didn’t have the opportunity to fail at selling. So I went to work for this HVAC Company. My first month I went out and sold $149,000 of residential heating and air conditioning projects. I made myself like $12,000 in commissions. I’m living in a shelter. I’ve been in prison. I’ve been in prison for the previous seven years, which by the way, is the ultimate credit repair service because
Doug Staneart Well yeah, you’ve got no history at this point. So, then what?
Writing New History
Weldon Long Right, I didn’t exist. At the same time, I didn’t have bad credit anymore. So, I was able to get a couple of credit cards and different things. I didn’t have any debt and worked for that company for a year. And I thought exactly, as you just suggested, like, “this guy doesn’t really care about service, right?” I’ve spent seven years reading all these books on the wow service, leadership stuff, the sales stuff and how to take care of people and customers. I thought, they’re doing it all wrong. Of course, everything I knew was theoretical. I mean, I didn’t have any practical experience sure.
Putting my “Practical Expereince” to Use
But a year into it, I quit and I opened up my own heating and Air Conditioning Company. And again, I didn’t know the first thing about the mechanical operational side. The very first thing I did was take out a full page ad in our Sunday newspaper, the Colorado Springs Gazette. That spread was $5,000. I put it on a credit card and I took out a full page ad.
It said air conditioning of furnace, blowout, sale, lowest prices ever. Right. Well, I didn’t have previous history. So of course it was our lowest prices ever. Across the bottom, I put operators standing by 24/7 to take your call. Adding to it some specials, pricing and different things. The operator standing by was the cell phone right here. It was me. I was the operator standing by. But, on that Sunday I set 16 sales appointments. Sixteen sales appointments for the following week. The first call I got Monday morning was from the building department because these other HVAC companies had been calling the city saying, “Hey, this guy’s advertising.”
Making Connections
Weldon Long They had known me since I worked for this other company for a year. Apparently, he opened his own company. Doesn’t have a license, doesn’t have any, anything. The building department called me and said, “listen, you can’t.” And I said, “I didn’t know. I needed the license.” They added, “yeah, you got to have a contractor’s license.” “Well, listen, I will come down and talk to you guys. I will not do a single install before I get licensed,” Somehow I go down, talk to the building department. I’ll never forget the CRO, Bob, and I tell him my story. He likes my story and says, “What’re you doing?’Cause I know a guy and believe it or not he’s currently in jail. He’s fixing to get out, and he’s got a license.”
Bob put me in touch with his buddy, and I start subcontracting my installs to him. This buddy was in for a short stint (DUI or something), so he walks out soon after. Bob’s buddy has work because I’m out selling systems. We were just hand to mouth, like this, for the next year or year and a half until it finally started. We did two and a half million dollars our first year. Very first year two and a half million in sales. Because we define our company as a sales and marketing company first. And I think that’s one of the mistakes a lot of small business entrepreneurs make. They get so caught up in the thing they do. And they probably are the best at it. But as you and I know the best technology, doesn’t always win. It’s the best marketing and sales.
Further Proof- Your Philosophies Bring Successes
Weldon Long Philosophies. That wins the game. Listen, I’ll give you another example. I’ve been travel consulting for 15 years now gaining a lot of the heating and air conditioning business. But as I mentioned I’ve worked with FedEx, Home Depot, Wells Fargo, and all different types of businesses. A lot of my air conditioning clients a few years ago started getting purchased up by these big private equity companies.
After COVID, these investors realized what great investments residential service companies were because they were necessary services. All the plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc, right? They can’t be outsourced to China or Mexico. Even if the economy goes down, they still have to do repairs. They may not replace the whole system, but they still have to fix the old ones. So I’m watching my clients and they’re selling for 10 and 12 and 15 multiples on EBITDA, ridiculous multiples.
What We do
Weldon Long So three years ago, I’m like, I have to get back in the contracting side. Right? My brother-in-law lives here in town. He wanted to get into the business. So, we opened a small heating and air conditioning company. I travel a lot, so I just do training consulting with him. He’s built the company the last three years. This is our third year, 2022, and we’re budgeted for 10 million this year. We’re not going to quite hit 10. We’re going to hit just over 9 million in our third year and people ask us, “how do we do it?”
The Difference it Makes
Weldon Long It’s because we focus on selling and marketing. You got to deliver great service to wow the customer. Need to blow ’em away. You got to be good at your technology. But if you obsess on that at the, at the expense of proper sales and marketing nobody will buy your stuff.
I find the biggest challenge for people in sales, entrepreneurs, and business owners isn’t a lack of talent. It’s not a lack of ability or desire either. It’s a lack of focusing on the right things. They get distracted with the perfect chair, the perfect office, the perfect whatever. Until you sell something, none of it matters. Right. The famous quote from Thomas Watson Senior is, “nothing happens till something gets sold.”
Doug Staneart Sold, I’m a big believer in that. Absolutely, it does you no good to have the best service or the best product if nobody knows about it. If nobody knows about it, you’ll never make it. You’re going to go broke.
The Power Of Consistency
Doug Staneart I want to, I want to delve into The Power of Consistency a little bit. Because the way that you’ve mentioned it back in your old life, you were pretty consistent. I mean, there was a lot of consistency in the old life.
Weldon Long In the old life, I was definitely in a rut.
Doug Staneart In the type of consistency that you were doing though, tell us a little bit about what you mean by the power? I’m assuming we’re talking about the habits that you create, right?
Weldon Long Well, it’s twofold. I leveraged the same principle of consistency in the sales process. Originally in The Power of Consistency, it was just about the mindset. When we have a thought, any thought, it sends an impulse across our brain to the hypothalamus. When the hypothalamus receives that thought it’s like a bolt of electricity. A very powerful electromagnetic field. Sure. That little bolt of lightning hits the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus then starts to create a chemical triggering a corresponding emotion. If I get very angry or I get scared, my brain starts producing epinephrine and adrenaline, and I feel those things. So emotions drive behavior. That behavior drives results. Well, what I learned is that thoughts are the foundation of everything. It drives emotions and behaviors. Even if our thought is wrong. They still produce very real responses.
A Choice Example
Think about it like this. It’s 11 o’clock at night, you and your family walk out of a theater. Suddenly and simultaneously, some guy comes running around the corner. He’s charging at your family. He’s screaming with a knife in his hand, and he’s covered in blood. There’s obvious intent to do harm to you and your family. Your immediate thought is danger within a nanosecond. Your hypothalamus creates a heightened state of emotion. You’re angry. You’re fearful, whatever. Then, it mkaes a choice of fight or flight.
Well, you decide very quickly that you can’t run (can’t leave the kids behind). So you decide, I have to fight. So, you step away from your family. You engage with the guy and take a swing. This catches him in the jaw. He drops like a sack of potatoes. What’s the result? You protected your family.
In the end, you realize that your thought was wrong. It turns out the guy that you hit was no threat whatsoever. That guy was a teenager. The blood and knife were fake. He was running across the parking lot to meet his friends behind you. It turns out you assaulted a perfectly innocent teenager because you thought wrong. The thought was wrong, but your emotions were real. This is what I realized was happening in my life. I was thinking all this stuff that was wrong. It was all limiting, false beliefs.
I Stopped letting my Thoughts Justify My Actions
Those wrong thoughts, emotions, and behaviors created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shat’s when I started learning. Your brain holds a “collection” and your life is in there. Your wealth, your relationships- everything. Neuroscientists say we have 30,000 decisions every day. So every day you’re reaching in your collection and pulling out thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and results. Well what’s inside, who created it, and are those things accurate?
Here’s another example, my dad used to say, “son, rich people are crooks.” He was a military guy. Never made much money. With that mindset, if I were to look at my nice house and car, I’d wonder who my dad screwed over. Right? So when I find myself in my twenties and stealing money to get money, I didn’t see the problem with that. Since rich people are crooks. Right? It gave an excuse for my actions as a grown man. If rich people are crooks then it takes crooked actions to get rich.
An Entreprenuerial Take
During the beginning of my talks I’ll often do a word association. I’ll ask the audience what the first one or two words they think of when they hear the word “salesman.” Specifically, a lady at one of my presentations furiously wrote down almost eight words in just two seconds. I asked her what she wrote and nearly every word had a negative connotation. What’s her position, you’re wondering? She’s a sales manager. Therein lies the problem. We have to make sure what’s in our head is consistent to what we’re trying to do.
If you’re out there trying to build a successful company and build wealth for your family; look within your collection. My grandpa would call our big family dinners a blessing. And he’d say, “look, how good the ‘po folk is eating tonight!”We’d defined our family as poor people. It’s no wonder we were all poor, right? So we got to look back at what are our core beliefs around money, sales, entrepreneurship, and all these things and make sure that our core beliefs in the box match what you put in there this morning. Not something somebody else from 30 years ago.
You Have to Retrain Your Brain
Doug Staneart So for somebody going through that right now, maybe they’re not as successful as they want to be. Or they’ve got the ambition, and they’re hitting a wall. I have a two part question here. Number one. How do you get them to see? Or how do you help people uncover those limiting beliefs? And then number two, how do you change them? What are some of the things that you teach your clients to do?
Weldon Long It starts with that. Maya Angelou said, “people don’t always remember what you tell ’em, but they’ll always remember how you made him feel.” So I always start with the emotion and with the heart, and then I leave with my story. It gets people thinking, “man, this guy was such a knucklehead and if he can do it, then so can I.” So I connect with people and I think that’s overlooked. There’s no just making people do things. You’ve got to make, ’em want it. When it comes to limiting beliefs, we have people go back and really look at the, at the core areas of their life(money, relationships, and health). We look at those three areas of the life, right and we start looking at what lessons they learned when they were young about each of them.
Our Collection Causes Limiting Beliefs
Weldon Long Although, I love my dad and miss him dearly in his 20 or so year absence. He put a lot of junk in my trunk with respect to women and money. So I had to examine the “results.” What did I learn from the way my father treated my mother or the things I learned about how my father dealt with money? I realized, it’s still some of my core beliefs.
So we start looking at that. Here’s the problem growing up, when you’re 10 years old and a grownup, especially familial, says something to you, it’s gospel. You believe it without a second guess. Dad said rich people are crooks at seven years old. As a kid, you don’t have the ability to reason or argue with that. Right. So, it becomes a core belief, buried over the next 20 years, and it becomes our truth. Although it’s completely BS, right? It becomes our truth and starts governing our emotions and our behaviors around that issue.
Another method I tell people to go back and talk to people who are close to them who something they want. So let’s say you want to make a million dollars. You go to a guy that’s a millionaire (and that you’re close to, so they’ll be honest) and use their honesty. Ask them, “hey, what do you see about me and the way I run my business? What do you think might be preventing me in making money? Then, you got to put your big boy/girl pants on. Right? You got to have thick skin.
Honest Feedback Needs a Thick Skin
Doug Staneart They’re going to tell the truth right. They’ll point out the flaws.
Weldon Long Exactly, tell them upfront to be brutally honest. With some warning, don’t go to somebody too close, like a sibling. They probably got the same junk in their trunk. So, and I’ve done this a couple times with buddies of mine that I golf with. I’ll ask what they see in my behavior. They will tell me and that’s why you got to have thick skin. Because if they love you, they’ll be honest with you. Your casual friends won’t tell it like it is. They’ll claim you’re fine.
As far as how you program it? Well, our minds aren’t set in stone.They’re soft, malleable. We call it neuroplasticity. You can grow new neural pathways through repitition. Though I didn’t realize it, this is what I was doing in prison. I have people create a prosperity plan like a vision board or bucket list. Identify the two major objectives in those each area of life. List the things you want to accomplish in each of those areas and pickone or two things. Feasible things that can be done every single day to move in that direction. Gotta keep it simple. I then teach “quiet time ritual”, 15 minutes a day reviewing that list.
Simple Neuroscience
Weldon LongThese ideas are nothing new. I’ve just packed into something simple and easy to understand. Soon after The Power of Consistency came out. I got a call from a guy named Ned Nottingham.
He’s a neuroscientist, and he teaches mindset at FedEx. He calls me up and he says, “Mr. Long, I got to tell you, this book is the simplest explanation of the neuroscience behind decision-making and the principles that are the underpinnings of rational motive, behavior therapy I’ve ever read in my life.” And I’m like, there’s a name for this stuff? Seems more like common sense. I just look at my life then and today. It’s through repetition. It’s not unlike the way that the military sometimes will brainwash people. Brainwashing is just breaking people down through repetition and inducing emotional responses to situations. Well, we can do that in a very positive way for ourselves.
Wrapping Things Up
Resonate: Doug’s Background
Doug Staneart I have a quick story that aligns with your journey. Basically when you reprogram your brain, you have to be very specific. Sometimes the thing that you’re telling your brain is that going to get it no matter what. So similarly, I grew up not as bad of a situation like yours, but we were pretty poor. I mean, I was a pretty poor kid. My dad moved us up into the middle class when I was in high school. So, most of my early years were living in a two room shack with no air conditioning. But as we moved up into middle society, my belief system started to change.
His List & Changes in Life
Ideas of college and university came into view. I followed through and attended a great university. I was the first kid and first person in my family to go to the university or attend beyond high school. While I was there though, my dad was continuing to grow, too. He became an entrepreneur and he started learning this stuff, and I was learning it through him.
He took me to a business conference and one of the guys on stage said, “Hey, you have to write down your dreams, write down your goals.” So, I did. I just wrote it down, and I remember one of the things that I wrote down was wanting to travel to all 50 states. This stemmed from my love to travel.
The second thing I listed was that I wanted to visit all of the countries in Western Europe. I thought that Europe was the rich man’s destination. That only the wealthy go there. So, I wrote that down and then I added that I wanted to make a million dollars by the time I was 30. Based on this view of a guy on stafe who made a million dollars by age 20 or 27. I admit, I thought, “I may not be as smart as that guy, but I can say 30. I’ll give myself until 30 to make a million dollars.”
The Professional Speaker and Weldon Long
Doug Staneart So the interesting thing is my list and focus on the items every day has driven me to where I am now. The decisions I’ve made brought me to become a professional speaker and I ended up marrying my wife who is from Ireland. So, when we got married and because she still had family there, she said, “hey, I want to go back.” We got to go every year to Ireland and visit my folks. Especially while the kids were little. It became our summer trip for a couple weeks or so. My wife and I would leave the kids, and we would then explore some new European country. That connection allowed me to see some pretty cool sites and views.
Again, as a professional speaker, my career has opened up travel opportunities. I haven’t quite made it to all 50 states, but I’m nearly there. The kicker from my list, that I think you’ll find interesting, is that I did end up making a million dollars. It took me a few more years than 30, but I did it! Some people don’t realize this, but there’s a difference between making and having one million dollars. A few more years passed before I actually got to the point where I had a million in the bank.
Keep in mind, the things you tell yourself is how you brain wire’s attaining that thing. If we keep thinking about it, and with specificity, our wires work in our favor and will make it happen.
The Subconscious is Strong
Weldon Long The subconscious mind especially is the most powerful problem-solving computer on the planet. It’s just a lousy judge of character and act on really negative ideas. Because of its poor judgment, you have to be very specific about the instructions you’re giving it. My wife and I love to watch murder mystery stuff. Every night I watch a new dude that thought he could get away with killing his wife. I’m keep asking, where do these ideas start? Well, they get some bad negative idea. Then the subconscious mind starts germinating.
There’s been situations where that brain fart happens and days later the answer comes. Your subconscious mind in this way never stopped trying to solve that “fart.” Writer’s block, financial crisis, or that comeback you should have used in third grade. The problem existed in the background until, DING, the subconscious serves up the solution on a silver platter. You’ve got to make sure and give it the right problems to solve.
Doug Staneart Nice, good deal. Hey, thanks a lot for, for being on the, the Podcast.I’m sure you’ve got like a ton of additional stories. So if you want to hear the rest make sure to buy The Power of Consistency. It’s got great information in it and we’ll get to learn a little bit more about Weldon. So Weldon, thanks a lot for being a part of High Impact Leaders.
Weldon Long Hey, my pleasure. And just for your listeners text my name Weldon to 72000. You’ll actually get some free videos that we produce on sales, mindset, entrepreneurship, and more. So just Weldon to 72000.