top of page

"If you had to start over"


 

You can listen to the podcast version of this episode on Apple, Spotify, or this audio player:


"I would begin asking myself, 'Where can I add value? Where can I help people solve problems? You know, where can I find a way to make a contribution? Where in exchange for that I will, you know, be earning a fee and bringing myself back financially?" — Bob Burg
 

Curt Mercadante asks mega-bestselling author Bob Burg what Bob would do if he “lost it all” and had to start over tomorrow.


Today’s episode is an excerpt from a recent workshop with Bob in our Freedom Circle Men’s Community.


For over 30 years Bob Burg has been successfully showing entrepreneurs, leaders, and sales professionals how to communicate their value and accelerate their business growth.

Although for years he was best known for his sales classic, Endless Referrals, it’s his business parable, The Go-Giver, coauthored with John David Mann that has created a worldwide movement.


While part of a four-book series, The Go-Giver itself has sold more than one million copies and been translated into 30 languages. It was rated #10 on Inc. Magazine’s list of The Most Motivational Books Ever Written, and was on HubSpot’s 20 Most Highly Rated Sales Books of All Time.


Bob is founder of The Go-Giver Community Network, the first of its kind online business community created by and for Go-Givers.


He is an advocate, supporter, and defender of the Free Enterprise system, believing that the amount of money one makes is directly proportional to how many people they serve.


Raw Transcript of this Episode:


[00:00:00] Curt Mercadante: Bob, you've done a lot of things and your journey has been one to get where you're at. You've had ups and you've had downs. You've been on news, you've TV news, you've been on sales stages, et cetera. If you somehow for whatever reason, lost it all and had to start over next week or tomorrow, where would you start?

[00:00:25] How would you start?

[00:00:28] Bob Burg: Well, you know, I, I would hopefully go into stoic mode and remind myself that what I cannot control, I need to not stress about. And it might be easier said than done. By the way, we're all human. You know, it's easy to say it, not always easy to do it. Uh, but then I'd ask myself, What can I control?

[00:00:47] Okay, Now I can probably control the thought processes of going through my options. Hmm. And I would begin asking myself, Where can I add value? [00:01:00] Where can I help people solve problems? You know, where can I find a way to make a contribution? Where in exchange for that I will, you know, be earning a fee and bringing myself back financially.

[00:01:15] I think that's all we can do. You know, Uh, we can only control what, what we can control.

[00:01:23] Curt Mercadante: and, and whether or not it's the internet bank or actual dollars. I mean, in our pretty recent history, we didn't have the internet. We didn't. If you can provide impact, whether it's trading pelts or paper money, right, Providing impact, there will always be a human market for that, right?

[00:01:42] Bob Burg: Yeah. You know, Engage talks about that all the time. It's never a money problem, it's an idea Problem. You know, it's, it's, can you find a way to, to add value to someone's life with something they want? Or can you solve a problem, help someone solve a problem? And there's financial value in, in both of those.[00:02:00]

[00:02:01] Curt Mercadante: You, you mentioned stoic mode and a g was on last week, by the way. We had him in, in the group last week and, and he mentioned stoicism as well. Um, and, and stoic philosophy. You know, there's, there's the stoic and then there's, well, he just seems stoic and at the root of it, his emotions. And people think the stoic had no emotions.

[00:02:23] You wrote a lot about emotions and can you talk a little bit about that and, Cause I think there's, E, everything has nuances, right? There's, there's, Don't let your emotions get the best of you. But then on the other side, there's kind of like this, especially I find amongst men, well just ignore your emotions.

[00:02:42] Where do you come from in terms of emotions and practicing that stoicism and the ability to be the calm and the storm?

[00:02:49] Bob Burg: First, you know, I wish I knew years ago that stoic weren't to be stoic, didn't mean to be emotionless. I always heard that, you know, stoic, the, [00:03:00] the stoic, they had no emotion. They just, they, they were totally about discipline and they had no fun.

[00:03:07] And so I never studied them. You know, I did, I really want to emulate something like that. I mean, I, I, you know, And that that's not what Stoicism is. And once I learned that and started reading about them and started reading some of the books written by the Stoic, I mean, oh my goodness, The wealth of information there is is just amazing.

[00:03:27] And I think stoic, stoic philosophy is not about being emotionless. It is about being able to master your emotions, which I think is, is big in many traditions. Um, Uh, you know, the sages of the tum would said, who is mighty and answered that person who can control their own emotions and make of an enemy a.

[00:03:50] Uh, you know, that's no, no different than, you know, stoic and probably Buddhist and Christian and Muslim and, you know, Hindu. And [00:04:00] I'm sure you could find every tradition that has something like that. It's just stoics sort of put a big, you know, a, a big premium on that. Premium on that. And it was about, you know, control, letting go of what you couldn't control and just taking action and controlling what you could control.

[00:04:14] I would boil if you could boil s. Philosophy down to that, which you can't, but if you could, that would basically be it. Control what you can control and don't stress about what you can't. Uh, and, and continuing to try to, to work on that. So when I think of emotion, emotions are a part of life, you know, to say, Well, we shouldn't be emotional.

[00:04:37] Well, if that's the case, then we're denying human nature. And one thing in my, you know, whatever it is, 40 year study of success. Is that successful people tend to deal in truth. They deal in lives, truths. They don't see life the way they, they wish it would. Well, they can see it that way, you know, they can [00:05:00] imagine it that way.

[00:05:01] But they, they deal with the fact that it's not necessarily that way. Right. They, they deal with what is, you know, it's sort of like the person, uh, you know, when, when people were trying to come up with a way. To fly, right, To invent, you know, a machine that could fly. Well, you know, the Wright brothers didn't go to a top of a cliff and, and, and put some, you know, uh, wooden wings on and say, you know, this gravity stuff is really getting in my way of flying.

[00:05:27] Okay? So I'm just gonna be think positively and deny that this gravity thing is there enough positive thinking it will work. Well then they go up, Well, what do they do? They follow the ground, they. Okay, because gravity is a truth on our earth. I can't speak about anywhere else, but in our lives, gravity is a truth.

[00:05:45] Is that good or bad? Well, it's neither. It's just a principle. It's a universal law. It's, it manifests good when keeping us from floating aimlessly up into space. It manifests bad when we. Fall off a seven story building. Okay? But gravity is a [00:06:00] truth. So what they did is they worked within the laws of nature, within the truths of nature.

[00:06:05] Uh, they learned physics, they learned the laws of aerodynamics, right? They learned about resistance and they, right, and they created a, a, a machine that could fly. But you, you have to start with truth, and then you don't get stuck in the truth. You utilize those truths in order to advance both yourself and the.

[00:06:26] Around you. Okay. So to deny emotion is to deny human nature. Now, that doesn't mean we have to be controlled by our emotions, which most of us are, okay? We are emotional creatures. Um, we like to think we're, we're rational. We like to think we're logical. And to a certain extent, of course we are, but we're pretty emotion driven.

[00:06:48] We make major decisions based on emotion, and we back up those emotional decisions with. We rationalize, which if you break up the word rationalize, it [00:07:00] simply means we tell ourselves rational lies. Okay? And we do that to justify the fact that we made an emotional decision when we shouldn't have. Okay. So by all means, you know, and we're never saying to deny your emotions.

[00:07:15] Emotions are a beautiful part of life. They bring us joy, They make life worthwhile. It's just that, that we need to be the master of our emotions as opposed to our emotions being the master of us. Or as my great friend, Dony Scacchi, great leadership speaker, who I think you know, uh, uh, as, as she so elegantly says, By all means, take your emotions along for the ride.

[00:07:40] but make sure you are driving the car. Mm. So that's the key. So, you know, so no, I would never suggest we don't pay, but there's, see, there's no, there's no natural division. There's no dichotomy between having emotions right. And feeling those emotions and [00:08:00] acting logically. It's just a matter of thinking and staying conscious.

[00:08:05] Mm.

13 views0 comments
bottom of page