Every dollar Elon Musk has made is traceable. Every product sold, every service rendered, every government contract awarded, every share of stock bought or sold. It’s all on the record. You, on the other hand, haven’t built a company, invented a product, or created anything people willingly pay for. You’ve spent the last 14 years collecting a $174,000 Senate salary. Yet somehow you managed to buy a luxury D.C. condo, a $4 million Victorian mansion in Cambridge, and saw your net worth balloon by 150% to $12 million. Everyone knows where Musk’s money came from. The same can’t be said for yours.

When I give my savings to @elonmusk they multiply. When I give them to you and all of the US government, they disappear.

Don’t worry about Elon becoming rich with his own money. Worry about politicians becoming rich with your money.

The reason anyone gets insanely rich is almost always because of the stock market. It certainly how @elonmusk did. And the reason they get rich from the stock market, is because 150m Americans decided they wanted to own shares of stocks directly, or through their retirement plans, or through other approaches as a way of building their net worth and trying to create a better life for themselves. One Hundred Fifty Million Americans. About 60% of adults. Effectively believing that @elonmusk and many billionaires could make them wealthier and help them achieve a better life. If you want @elonmusk , and most billionaires to no longer be that rich, convince those 150m to sell their stocks, funds, ETFs whatever. Of course you would wipe out the net-worth of most of those people, and everyone else’s savings, as the markets crashed and brought down the economy and created the worst depression we have ever seen. Alternatively There are ways to improve healthcare access and eventually make it available to all. To start - If you want @elonmusk and all billionaires to improve healthcare for everyone , ask them to stop doing business with the enormous healthcare conglomerates and to work directly with transparently priced care providers. It’s the behemoth HC conglomerates that make HC so bad for so many. (Check my timeline for more detail) Removing them would push the cost of healthcare down for everyone. Their corporate decisions impact our healthcare cost and availability. Of course if they do that, not only would our HC costs go down , and the quality of care for their employees and the entire country go up But They would see their corporate cash flow increase dramatically and we would have more millionaires, billionaires and maybe even another trillionaire when that cash flow moved from the big health care conglomerates to their bottom line, so would the net worth of the 150 million American adults that own public stocks Capitalism is better than socialism because 150m Americans can influence exactly what happens in this country.

Gramma Anna used to say, “You can hope for the best all you want, but I promise you, the day you wear your new boots is the day the cows decide to have diarrhea.” Salespeople are overly programmed to keep an optimistic outlook, and that they can manifest success into happening. This is why they go into a “failspin” and crash when things don’t go as planned. I too was a serial optimist in my sales career. But I also benefitted from gaming out worst case scenarios in my head. Invest some mental calories playing, “If this, then that.” Always have a backup plan to your backup plan in your back pocket. It will give you some resiliency when the expected handshake becomes a sucker punch.

One metric to gauge your best leaders by is how many of their directs have been promoted within the company. It’s one thing to develop talented folks to the point that they leave the company for greener pastures elsewhere. But to balance the upward trajectory needs of talented individuals with the evolving needs of the organization in a way that retains top talent takes a deft touch. These leaders are rare. When you find them, pay attention to what they are doing differently and inoculate the rest of your leaders with it.

This line from my friend, Bradley Hartmann, gave me pause: “Bad news delivered early creates options. Bad news delivered late creates problems.” Sales reps are in the “happy endings” business. Eagles in the sky, flowers in the meadow, unicorns crapping rainbows, kind of business. Until it isn’t. So much of professional selling is counterintuitive. This is a big one. Telling the customer the bad news is always better than hearing the bad news from them. Own the problem, own the solution, and you’ll own the customer. Says easy. Does hard.

In a client’s sales team meeting, we talked about the value of identifying a sales rep’s P.S.T. - Personal Sales Team. These are the people who sell for you when you’re not in the room. For this group, it was the homebuilders who use them again and again on every project, and the architects and designers who recommend the sales rep to their clients. How about you? Who is on your P.S.T.? Make your list. Call each of them, and thank them for the trust they put in you. You’ll feel good saying it, and they’ll feel good hearing it. WIN - WIN

Much hand wringing and pearl clutching about whose job AI will kill and whose it will pass over to use a biblical reference. Here’s the reality. AI is only as “smart” as the collective World Wide Web (remember that term?) It is a huge rearview mirror, and its “windshield” can only be as informed as the road that got it here. Here’s what AI will never be: “True Leadership”, because True Leadership is wisdom in the moment.

A prayer for us this week: Gandhi said, “If I do not see God in the face of the next person I meet, I need look no further.” Creator of all, help us to remember that every person has been created by you and they are worthy of being treated as a Child of God. If we can’t see the divine in them, the problem is not with our eyes, but with our hearts. Help us to see the truth this week. Amen.”

So, I make $100 and the government takes 1/3 of that. I take the 2/3 remaining to me and I buy something that I need. They tax that. I take what is left over and split it in half: half to the bank and have to an investment account. The interest I make from the bank? They tax that. The interest I make from my investments? They tax that. If somehow, after all the confiscations, I’m able to buy myself a piece of land they will tax my purchase. Then, even though they pretend I owe the land, they charge me every year for the right to live on it. While the Democrats and Republicans keep us fighting each other over how much billionaires are taxed, we stop looking at how much money they take from us and pour into a monstrous bureaucracy that every day seems to take away a little more of our freedoms and give us less in return. Just a note for all of you who have picked a side in the tyrannical two party system.

When folks reach out for coaching, some will ask, “This isn’t like therapy is it, because I’ve done therapy” “No, therapy looks at your past to make sense of who/where you are today. Coaching looks at who/where you are today and who/where you want to be in the future, and the best path to get there.” Think of coaching as the windshield and therapy as the rearview mirror. You need both, but there’s a reason the windshield is a helluva lot bigger. That’s how I landed on the tagline for TRaction when I started it three years ago. Where ya headed?

Team leaders: Someone on your team has just “screwed the pooch” as Gramma Anna used to say. They come to you, distraught, apologetic, and at a loss how to fix it. What’s your first move? Well, take heart that they felt safe enough to confess the error and not hide it. That means you have been doing some things right as their leader. Don’t taser them. They’re already mad at themself; you being mad at them too doesn’t help anything. The immediate question is whether the situation is fixable or not. If yes, then make them responsible for coming up with and implementing a resolution. Don’t rescue them. If no, then focus on what their plan is to make sure this doesn’t happen again in the future. In other words, what have they learned from this. Whichever way it goes, your last words in their ears should be, “Nobody’s perfect. You’ll likely make more mistakes in the future if you’re really pushing the envelope. Just make damn sure it’s not this one again.”

Many suppliers in my world of building products provide their sales teams with a leads source. The leads are “qualified” in that they represent a new home or remodeling project that pulled a building permit. The leads are not yet “vetted”. That’s the job of the sales reps. To make contact (however many times it takes), to inquire about the details of the project. If there’s a fit, to establish the value you provide, to provide a quote, and to be professionally persistent in closing. If the reps are not diligent in following up on these leads even after months of coaching, cajoling, and threatening, the question has to be asked, “Do we have the right people on the bus?” Leaders don’t want to ask that question because dehiring and rehiring is a metric buttload of work. It’s easier to just keep whistling past the graveyard telling yourself “the market is soft right now”. What path do you want to go down?

The more I think of this picture the more I have to laugh. Democrats are straight up delusional. They are tanking hard with men so their solution is to shove forward this limp wristed Talarico clown who hates everything real Texas stands for. Now they slap a pristine cowboy hat and five o’clock shadow on him and parade him around like some cheap parody of the oil field grit, ranching, farming, and hunting culture we live every day. Real Texans smell this plastic consultant bullshit from a mile away. We’re not voting for this manboy.

The most accurate description of leftists.👇 Pride Month be like: LGBT: I'm gay Everyone else: Ok LGBT: I'm REALLY fucking gay Everyone else: ok LGBT: Teach your kids about it or you're a bigot Everyone else: Okay, that's a little too far— LGBT: FUCK YOU, YOU TRANSPHOBIC NAZI FASCIST Everyone else: Yeah… this movement has lost the plot. LGBT: OmG I'm literally shaking, so oppressed, biggest victim in human history. And that boys and girls is it in a nutshell.

Sales Leaders: If your pipeline reviews sound like a weather report, “A bit overcast, might clear up, chance of closing next week.” you’re not managing sales, you’re hosting a forecast-themed podcast. Good sales leaders don’t ask, “How’s it looking?” They ask: “What changed since last week?” “What evidence says this deal is moving?” “What’s the customer’s decision process?” “What commitment did we earn?” We’re moving into summer months here in North America. Don’t let your team lull you into the “Lazy, hazy, crazy days of Summer” mentality. Stay sharp with your questions.

Sales Leaders: If your team only gets “coaching” after they miss the number, that’s not coaching. That’s a CRM autopsy. Good sales leaders don’t wait until the deal is dead to ask better questions. They get in the game earlier: “What’s the customer trying to solve?” “Who else has to say yes?” “What’s the next real commitment?” “What’s our risk of losing this to ‘do nothing’?” Because by the time the forecast is ugly, the problem usually isn’t this quarter’s activity. It’s last quarter’s leadership

A prayer for us this week: “Creator of all, please grant us perspective. To appreciate that the time between our “born on” date and our “expired” date is but the blink of an eye in the light of eternity. Help us remember that while the days are long, the years are short. Especially the years we have to positively influence the next generation. May we not waste a single drop of the time you have graced us with. Amen.”

Islam has a problem with Gays, Jews, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhist, Hindus, Women, Non-Muslims, Atheists, beer, wine, bacon, and dogs But if I have a problem with Islam, I'm the bigot and Islamophobic? Can you see how ridiculous it is?