Top Tips To Create A Persuasive Sales Letter

 

 Who Cares Wins

"It's not what you know, but who you know that gets jobs done."

-Ronald Reagan

Who cares wins. This idea is one of the most common clichés in our society, and it has a lot of truth to it. If your friends and family are already successful and have achieved a certain level of income, chances are, they have some skills in common with you. It's because of this concept that many people end up working for their extended family members or grandparents when no other opportunities seem to be available for them.

If you want to achieve success, it's important for you to have the right connections and to develop a network of powerful people, who have or are willing to give you opportunities. I feel that the first step in overcoming this major obstacle is to decide what exactly it is you want. It's one thing to say "I want a good job," but it's another thing entirely to come up with a set of goals and a detailed plan of action on how you're going to achieve those goals.

This is easier said than done, but hard work pays off. Just look at people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. These three individuals were able to achieve success despite being born into very uncomfortable conditions. Many of us can relate to this; I know I can.

I have been in the same situation as these young men, only worse. At just the tender age of four years old, my mother and I were out on the streets trying to survive. I was living with a single parent who struggled with substance abuse issues and had developed an extensive criminal record while working a minimum wage job that barely paid what we needed to live comfortably on our own. As a result of all this, I was placed in the custody of my grandmother and aunt. They took us with them to work only to have us removed from their home later because of their drug habits and inability to properly care for us. My mother, who was still abusing drugs at that time, would lock me up in a room or leave me outside for hours as her drug usage went on. That's when I realized my life was going nowhere fast; to make matters worse, it seemed that no one wanted anything to do with me because I wasn't anyone's real child.

I felt powerless over my life and the people around me, but I refused to give up. I decided to make something out of my life and to get my education, despite the odds against me. I worked hard, got into a good school, and got accepted into college. I knew that if I wanted success in life, I had to be self-sufficient. There was no way in hell that grandpa was going to help me buy a car with his money!

If you're going to do everything right for yourself, you can't expect anyone else to do it for you. When I went back home after college and got a job at the local dockyard as an electrician's helper, many people were surprised by how conservatively dressed I was when they first saw me working in the yard.

"But you're wearing a suit!" they'd say.

"Yeah, well I'm going to wear it here, because it's how I dress at work," I would tell them. "I am an employee, not a customer."

People respected me for that and started to take notice of me. They knew that if they wanted something done right, they would have to deal with me directly—just like the head electrician did. And as time went on, he opened the first line of communication between me and the upper management in order to get things done as quickly as possible.

I wasn't doing any favors for him; I was simply making him look good by keeping everyone happy. This would give me the opportunity to network with people at the upper management level and lower, as well. I remember one time when I was bringing in a 3-phase service from the street to the new dockyard office building. My boss came outside and told me that he wanted me to run power from this new 3-phase service across a couple hundred feet of parking lot, underground, and into the ground floor of the office building for his boss so he could get his fridge working in his office. After giving my challenge a little thought, I pulled my tape measure out of my toolbelt and walked around looking at electrical panels. I noticed the panels weren't grounded, but I didn't tell my boss that. "These panels aren't grounded," I told him.

"Who cares?" he said. "I just need power to the building."

"Well, sir, if you don't ground these panels and water gets in them, they'll be a shock hazard."

He asked me how much it would cost to ground them and I told him about $300 for all four panels. He just looked at me for a moment before saying he'd pay for it. "I don't mind paying for it," he said. "I just need power to the building." You see, this guy didn't care about grounding the panels as long as he got what he wanted. I'm sure his boss was paying him a fair amount of money to run his refrigerator; after all, he'd probably get fired if his boss didn't have power to run his fridge.

There's no point in winning a battle if you can't win the war later on. In other words, there's no point in putting up with my crap just to get something done if there are going to be major repercussions later on down the road because of one small incident here and there.

We are all human, so we do things like these every day of our lives. We have to learn to be more adaptive, and we have to learn to be more productive. The key is to avoid burning out from making an effort just because the worst-case scenario in your mind's eye is something way worse than you're able or willing to deal with in the moment.

The trick is not only being adaptable and creative, but also being resourceful. The only thing that really matters in life is your results; everything else is simply smoke and mirrors that you're trying to distract you from the truth of where you really stand on a cellular level—with yourself and with everyone else around you. If you truly want to be motivated, you have to know what your core values are and then set goals that are aligned with them. True success comes from the combination of goal-setting and achieving those goals. True motivation comes from sticking to your plans, keeping yourself centered (instead of getting caught up in the smoke and mirrors game), and taking care of all of the things that really matter to you in life.

9

Success Is Not a Number on Your Paycheck

There's more to life than just making money! If you look around at all the so-called successful people out there, you'll realize pretty quickly that many of them were not born rich or even middle class.

Conclusion

Most of my friends from the projects I grew up in, for instance, are self-employed people who have their own businesses. Many of them weren't born rich or middle class; they simply had a great work ethic and execution skills that set themselves apart. They worked hard to make a living, guided by their core values, and then created their own opportunities through persistence and growth. So if you look at the 'hood as an example of economic diversity instead of economic disparity—and if you start understanding that most 'hood people don't care about money anyway—then what you see in your neighborhood is pretty much a reflection of how successful people get ahead in life today.