Weldon Long
speaker
182 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Weldon Long’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I love to see, as I mentioned, with the young guys like you, and I know you're not a baby and you're a grown-ass man. But it's coming with a new energy. Your brand has been so much fun to watch, and there's a lot of other guys out there. But you're definitely in kind of a league by yourself. Just watching the youngsters coming up. You've got the old goats like me. We're done, man.
We're going golfing and fishing, and you guys are really, really tearing it up out there.
In the hour.
I saw your affirmation in there about being a billionaire. I don't know if it's happened yet, but I'm sure it will if it hasn't. I think it all starts with mindset.
You mentioned the keynote I was doing for that financial services group this morning. It was all about the mindset. And that's what I realized after my dad died in 96 and I started this journey of reading. I remember I came across a quote from Nietzsche. Nietzsche said, we attract that which we fear. And to be honest with you, when I first read that, I'm like, well, that's bullshit.
Like, why would I attract things in my life that I fear that I don't want? So I just kind of ignored it. A couple of months later, in the summer of 96, I'm reading through the Bible, just randomly grabbing some scriptures. I come across a scripture in Job. Father, that which I have feared has come upon me.
I'm like, well, that's, you know, Nietzsche was an atheist, right, and a secular kind of guy, and Job, obviously, a God-fearing guy, thousands of years apart, saying the exact same thing. I attract that which I fear, that which I have feared has come upon me. Then I was reading Man's Search for Meaning and come across a line where Viktor Frankl says that fear may come true.
And so I started thinking like, wait a second, maybe, maybe just maybe all this miserable life I have, I'm attracting to me. So I sat down and wrote a list out of everything I feared the most. And it was, it was my life. Not being a father, being incarcerated, being broke, being homeless. Like everything I wrote down, that was my life. Like I have indeed. This is around 30 to 40 years old.
No, this was 32 when my dad died. Oh, I'm still in prison. I got seven years left to go at this point. Yeah. So I'm in prison and I start realizing this. So then I started reading all the classics, Think and Go Rich, that type of stuff. And I realized I got to change what's in here. And so what I realized is like this brain up here, I use a metaphor of a box, right?
And in that box, if I have a motorcycle, all the components for a motorcycle, and I pull the parts out and put it together, it's a motorcycle. It's not something else. It's going to be the same thing it was in the box. Well, to me, the metaphor is our mind is a box. And every day, neuroscientists say that we pull 30,000 decisions out of there every day. Imagine that, 30,000.
Subconscious, second nature system decisions. But every time we make a decision, we pull out a little piece of our life. The question then becomes what's in there and where did it come from? And most of it came from when we were kids and other people put it in there. Well, what if I want something different than my dad wanted? What if I want to be a better father, a better husband?
What if I want to be wealthy instead of broke like my dad was? Well, as long as I'm making decisions based on what he put in here, I'm screwed. I've got to change the contents of the box. That's what The Power of Consistency, my second book, is all about. How do I change the contents of that box?
Yeah. Well, you walk into any HVAC company and get a group of technicians, comfort advisors, even people in the office, installers, and ask them what the first word comes to mind when you say the word salesman. And what I've been doing this 20 years, 70% of them have a negative word comes to mind. Now stop and think about this. We're in a sales-driven organization, a marketing-driven organization.
That's what our business is. And 70% of the people in our companies have a negative impression of sales, high pressure, sleazy, whatever, dishonest. And we wonder why so many small service companies struggle with the sales because they don't have a sales culture because the belief is, the mindset is that sales is sleazy. It's high pressure. It's whatever.
And so the first thing that we do when we work with an organization, for example, is we change the mindset. It doesn't matter how good a sales system is if you've got 70% of the people that refuse to use it. You know? So I got to get there and change it.
Yeah. So I think it goes back to the Great Depression because everybody in this country is two or three generations removed. And kind of the mindset, the scarcity mindset, the anti-business, the anti-sales mindset, in my mind, started then. If you think back to your high school history class, we had a name for those successful guys, right? The robber barons. Vanderbilt, J.P.
Morgan, J. Paul Getty, all those guys, right? They were bad names. When I was growing up, my dad used to tell me rich people were crooks. Where do you think he learned that? From his father that grew up in the Great Depression. So I think a big part of it, Tommy, is... We first have to identify the problem. So I'll say, what do you think about when I say salesman? They give me some negative word.
How do you think that's going to work given the fact you're in sales? How is that going to work for you? If you think fundamentally that sales is sleazy, high pressure, whatever, and so hopefully getting them to recognize the problem. And then talk about where those beliefs came from, right? It's probably something, what I call junk in the trunk, some idea we picked up along the way.
When you're 10 years old and your dad says rich people are crooks, you don't second guess that. That's gospel. My grandfather, Tommy, when we would do like a big meal, my mom, my grandmother cooked these big meals. He'd have us say a blessing. And after he said amen, he would say, look how good the po-folk is eating tonight. I think is rooted in the Great Depression.
And unless your name's a Rockefeller or Vanderbilt or Morgan or J. Paul Getty, you probably were poor. Your family was probably poor in the Great Depression, just like my family was. And so we had this animosity, and it's been growing for 100 years. And I think we're just seeing the total manifestation of it. People think they can't do it. They think there's something wrong with it.
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