- All right John, thank you so much.
Can I call you John or do I have to call you Mr. Thank You?
(laughs)
- You can call me Mr...
You can call me John, John's good.
- John, John.
Okay well John, thank you so much
for being on our podcast today.
For those of you that are listening,
John is Mr. Thank You.
So I won't go in,
there's no way my explanation is going to
be as good as your explanation.
So I will just ask you to share with everybody
what is the Mr. Thank You project?
- Yeah, so the the Mr. Thank You project
started in October of 2016
and so what I do professionally is I am a gratitude salesman
so I work in the corporate gifting world.
So I work for Cutco Cutlery.
Many you guys have heard of them,
it's a direct sales product
and I've been with a brand for 16 years
and I evolved into the closing gift division
where I basically sell large scale amounts of gifts
to you real estate agents, mortgage professionals.
And so literally I help people say thank you for a living.
It's been my life for a long time now
and what happened was in about September of 2016
I kind of hit this peak
and also this moment of sort of desperation
where I was doing well,
but I was also just overworking myself
and it wasn't very fulfilled.
And so I was really trying to find a way to
align my values with my business
and so I said I'm this guy who's all about
gratitude and appreciation and whatnot,
but if you were to ask a hundred people
who know John Israel, what do you know about him?
They might say some great stuff like
driven or successful, but I don't think the word grateful,
maybe even happy, would be a word that
they'd used to describe me.
So I thought that was inconsistent.
So I sought out some type of project.
I love projects, something for a year that I can take on
that will allow me to grow
and especially I decided well what can I do for a year
to help me elevate my level of gratitude?
I'm this gratitude guy, how do I be consistent with that?
So I out of some research
and reflection on experiences of my life,
I thought well what if I just committed
to writing thank you cards every day for a year?
And I thought like well how much should I write?
Should I write one a day, two a day?
One today didn't seem like enough.
10 felt like too much, I don't think they'd be very good.
So I thought about five.
Five would be a really interesting commitment,
like what might happen in my life
if I was committed to writing five thank you cards
every day for an entire year?
And that's basically what it started out as
and I did that starting October 10th 2016,
ran with that for an entire year.
So I wrote 1,825 thank you cards in 365 days,
which sounds even absurd saying right now,
but it was life-changing
and really positively benefited my business,
my influence, I was really surprised on
how that affected my community
and my influence in my community.
And a lot of really interesting things showed up out of it
and so what the Mr. Thank You project evolved into
because I don't know if we'll talk about it here,
but unexpectedly it got me on the news,
like Fox News and ABC News heard about it.
They interviewed me and I'm like man,
I'm just this guy who is writing thank you cards,
like I don't know why this is such a big deal.
But I think it just kind of landed for people
in the capacity in which I was doing it.
And so we got a lot of feedback from people
who love the mission, love the idea,
and wanted to start their own Mr. Thank You project
and started writing one thank you card a day or three a day
or had some really interesting stories
from just readers and listeners.
And so we started the Mr. Thank You project,
which is really the big scale is to
inspire 74 million thank you cards written around the world,
which is effectively 1% of the world's population.
And I just remember as a kid, someone shared a story
about what could affect 1% of the world
and they were talking about it more of a negative way,
like collective neglect.
How when we don't care about people
and how that affects others and the I thought well,
what about the opposite?
What if we could do something in the other realm
where if we affected 1% of the population in a good way,
what might happen?
And that's what the Mr. Thank You project is now
and so I speak a lot and share the stories of
what happened for me that year
and inspire people to write more than thank you cards.
It's pretty fun.
- Awesome, so I have a list of questions.
(laughing)
- Sure, let's do it.
- Ranging from super ethereal to
like very detailed like execution questions.
- Sure.
- So one that just came to mind as you were sharing
and I'm just like I told you before,
I feel like I should say this publicly.
I'm super grateful for you as well,
for you and Monica.
And just I want to applaud you
for the courage of going public with something like this,
because I'm a big fat chicken
and I just want to let you know that your work
has inspired me not to be so chicken and...
yeah, since I read your stupid book
I've actually been telling people
I'm going to work more on my book.
So thanks a lot for that.
- Mm.
- So maybe I'm not grateful to you I don't know.
(laughs)
- I'm making you work,
making you work for it girl.
- The other day Karen and I did a video on this question.
Does success lead to happiness
or does happiness lead to success?
Your thoughts Mr. Thank You.
- Yeah, that's a great question.
And I think that in a lot of people's rights,
I was pretty successful
and I think really success ultimately
comes down to your definition of it
because if you fit it then you're successful
and you feel good and if you don't then then you're not
in your own eyes, but other people
can have their own opinions.
So for me success, the more I've learned about it,
the more I've accomplished,
the more sales goals I've hit,
the more I've learned that the,
it's the destination never is as fulfilling
as you think it is.
It's exciting and it's always just like a
cool, we're here, now what?
And so the more that my life has evolved
over the 16 years of being a Sales Professional,
the more I've just looked at how do I align my values
with everything I do, such that when I'm in activity
I'm feeling fulfilled in the moment.
Because I see I'm consistent with my values,
not just a goal.
Like there's always a goal,
like there's always a sales number,
there's always something to strive for
and that's really where I think the Mr. Thank You project
came into play was not like,
how can I actually enjoy this time?
How can I enjoy my life and my business,
rather than just doing a task every day
and picking up the phone and calling another prospect.
So that's what I would say is success to me
looks more like honoring your values in everything you do
so you feel alive while you're doing it.
- Yeah, I love what you have to say about values.
Tell me more about why you think that's so important.
- Specific to values or specific to gratitude?
- I don't know if it matters,
like we talk about like even the intro of this podcast is
we teach network markers how to improve their sales
and sales leadership skills while being a good human.
That's kind of our tagline, like this concept of
can you be in sales and be a good human?
- Right, yeah.
- Thoughts on that?
- Yeah, I think that the more...
and this is I mean, to make sales transparent is
to bring the humanists to it
and I would say that with the Mr. Thank You project
that's probably one of the best things it did for me
as a sales person was that it became,
it was no longer sales person/customer, right?
Two sides of the spectrum.
It was like human being and human being interacting
and the more often there's a deeper level of trust there,
the easier sales come.
There's a great book called The Closers 2 by Ben Gay III
and he is a fun guy to follow on social media,
but a friend gift told me about that book
back when I was a young Cutco sales rep, about 20 years old.
And he talked about this philosophy of sales infiltration,
which sounds bad but what it means is
building such a high level of trust with another person
that they don't even ask you about price anymore,
they just trust you to charge them
whatever you believe is right
to give them a product they're going to value and enjoy.
- Yeah, I love that.
- And that was so powerful because then I saw okay well,
how do I do that?
How do you build such a great connection with somebody
and I think it comes from just by being
the most authentic version of yourself.
So for me, gratitude is a real core value of myself
and in my business and so for me,
honoring that value is important
and it's just being consistent.
I think there's a higher level of trust
with what you say and what you implement
and what people see.
So it's kind of like if someone's selling fitness products,
but they're out of shape.
- Mm-hmm.
- It's like are you really honoring that value
that you think other people should honor?
They're going to honor it based on how they see you act
and I think that's what's important
with whatever your values are
that they're really lived as an expression in what you do.
- I love that.
Thanks so much for sharing, that was awesome.
May pause in the profoundness of it all.
(laughs)
I think there are a couple of challenges
that our audience have in being leaders
or being in sales in their network marketing business.
Is it cool if I throw a couple questions at you,
get your thoughts?
- Absolutely.
- All right so one, is client retention
and I know that's something that's really important to you.
So in network marketing,
we don't want to just make the one sale,
we want people to be able to go over,
like continues come back over and over again.
I admit that I didn't really, I don't have it down on this.
I mean I understand it from a customer perspective
because when I was selling Cutco,
I was just like here's your homemaker set.
Have a nice lifetime, right, or whatever.
- Right, yeah.
- I mean this was almost 20 years ago,
I know that the company has evolved since then.
So what ideas do you have
and how does this, specific to gratitude
or not specific to gratitude on retaining customers?
So I know that's something you're really good at.
- Yeah, so client retention is really kind of
at the heart in the root of what we do.
So take our business out of it
with respect to yes, we sell gifts to businesses
and the people to give away.
What we're really about is keeping clients
continuing to order.
I mean, that's what every business wants.
It's not about the order, it's about the repeat order,
and the residual and all that comes with it.
And when I thought about what are companies and businesses
that I just actively enjoy, like I enjoy buying from them.
And when I think about those companies,
what they've done is they've created
this really enjoyable user experience.
So what I did was I just looked at,
like yes, my value is gratitude and being grateful.
Is it possible to have a client experience
where they can literally say,
I am grateful that John Israel is my Cutco salesman
because I just have such a great experience
buying and enjoying and using my product from him.
I enjoy it, I am grateful for him.
How can I create that experience as often as possible
with as many clients as possible
because if that's the case, the sales just happen.
Because there's just a natural attraction of
I want to do this again.
And so I think there's a lot
and I think that you what you said of hey,
I made a sale, on to the next one, right?
That's the nature of business, it's new business.
We're always just striving and driving for the new business,
but at the same time when we take a step back
and we look at the value of retaining a client,
I mean it costs a lot less money to retain a client
than it does to go find a new one.
So systematically what people have done is
they've found systematic ways of finding new clients,
but how many people have found
systematic ways of keeping clients?
What's their client retention strategy?
Most people don't have that.
So on the simple side of, there's two parts of this
that I would say is like with the Mr. Thank You project,
it was a really fascinating thing to look at.
I probably had about 450 sales transactions that year
when I started the Mr...
Actually no, it was look closer to 800
with the Mr. Thank You project.
And when I look back, every business
has a cancellation ratio, right?
Like how many clients start that don't finish?
How many clients that...
For some of you guys might be like,
who buys their demo kit or samples,
but then never does a demo,
never does a single thing with it?
And so we have that within inside of Cutco
and it used to be like 10%.
Like I would plan that 10% of my sales would cancel out
and then that number got down a little bit.
I think my best I got to is about 5%,
5% of my my sales would cancel.
And what was crazy was when I look at the
Mr. Thank You project,
I sent a thank you card to every single client.
And I'll share a little bit about in a moment,
what I actually said that might help some people.
I sent a thank-you card to every single client
who spent money with me that year who bought something,
and that cancellation ratio while it was pretty good at 5%,
cut in half to 2.5%.
And when you think about lost income from canceled business
or a lack of repeat business
that is a massive, massive hole people aren't even aware of
in their business that you can...
you make money by money you don't lose.
And it's such a simple thing,
but we're so focused on new business
we don't think about well,
how do I just keep what's here, here.
And it's really simple.
And I think it's what we talked about earlier.
It's bring that human experience
that you're a human connecting with another human,
not just a salesperson creating a transaction
and then you're on to the next one
and they feel like a number.
Because as soon as people feel like a number,
they start to treat you like a number.
They start to treat you like another business.
They shop around, they find a better price,
a better product,
because they just don't feel that human connection.
And it's interesting, you can literally charge people more
for the same product but just create a better connection
and they will joyfully keep buying from you
and never shop around because that connection is
what they're paying for.
And so I think that anything people can do
to develop that human connection makes a big difference.
And I'll give a simple story with this
that kind of came out in the wrong,
in not an unexpected way.
So it was my first summer selling Cutco.
I was 19 years old and I was,
we work off of our initial network
and then we ask for referrals and we go from there.
So I was seeing somebody to demo product
and was like my friend's mom,
my friends mom's co-worker, super random.
And her name was Cynthia Blackman.
She was super sweet.
I go over to her house demo Cutco.
She loved it, she actually already had some Cutco
that was like 30 years old
so she's like of course, I'll buy some more.
That's what she did.
And then within 24 hours she calls me to cancel the order
and I was kind of thrown off.
It was my first canceled sale ever
and I was like I don't even know what to do,
like did I do something wrong or whatever?
And in the conversation it happened pretty quick
and I said hey, is everything okay?
Did I do something wrong?
She's like no, I just have to cancel.
Can't talk about it, gotta go
and then she like hung up and I was like oh, man.
So it kind of really threw me off
and I still thought about it with like
24 to 48 hours later I was still thinking about it
and I was like man, why is this still bothering me?
And I thought because I just enjoyed meeting this person,
like sale or no sale, I just had a great time
connecting with her, getting to talk about her bird.
She had a bunch of pet birds and her family and her sons
that she was really proud of.
And so I was like you know what?
This is before Mr. Thank You project,
before this was ever even part of my life,
and I said you know what, I'm gonna send her
a thank you card, even though she canceled her sale.
And so what I wrote was dear Cynthia,
I wanted to reach out to say thank you for your time.
I know it didn't work out,
this opportunity for you to purchase Cutco,
but I just want to let that regardless of that,
I am just grateful for the time we spent together.
I really enjoyed getting to meet your birds,
hear about your kids, hear about your work, and your life
and if you ever need anything in the future let me know,
but otherwise I just want to let you know
how much I enjoyed our time together.
That was it.
Wrote the cards, sent it.
Now two things, one thing that's interesting is
like the emotional impact of expressing gratitude
during painful experiences.
Because it sort of diffuses the situation
because you're kind of like releasing
the the hold that that pain has on you
by bringing gratitude to it.
And I thought that was a really...
Unexpectedly I wrote this card and I suddenly felt better
and I just stopped worrying about it
and I literally just forgot about it honestly.
Went on with my life.
Two years later, I'm in college, in my dorm room,
still selling Cutco and I get this random phone call.
And I answer the phone and the other line says hey,
is this Cutco John?
That's what everyone called me, Cutco John.
Is this Cutco John?
I said, yes, this is Cutco John.
How can I help you?
And she says well might not remember me,
but my name is Cynthia Blackman
and we met a couple of years ago
and I was trying to buy some Cutco knives,
but I had to cancel.
I was like of course, I remember you Cynthia.
How are you?
And she's like well I'm doing a lot better now
and I'd like to place my order.
I'm like huh, awesome!
So she's like I have my catalog,
I'd like to place an order.
So she lists out tons of stuff,
I'm talking an order three times the size of
what she originally purchased.
And I was kind of blown away.
I'm like and she didn't ask for a discount,
she didn't ask for anything,
and then I was kind of blown away.
I was like wow Cynthia, like thanks for reaching out to me
to place your order and she says well John,
do you know why I'm calling you?
I said, I have no idea.
She says all those years ago
when I bought that Cutco from you
I really wanted to get it,
but what I couldn't tell you at that time
was that I had just found out
that I was diagnosed with cancer
and that I was gonna have to leave my job
and my boys were gonna have to move back into the house
to basically help support me as I went through
everything I had to go through.
And when I got your card in the mail,
it showed me that you
saw me as someone more than just a customer,
but another human being that you valued.
And I told myself when I'm healthy one day,
I'm gonna call this guy back
and I'm gonna buy knives from him
and that's why I'm calling you today.
- Wow.
- And I mean, we just started tearing up on the phone
and it was just this experience that,
by the way, thank you cards were not a part of my life.
I don't even know where it came from.
I didn't even write thank you cards
to my graduation presents that my mom was bugging me about,
but I just felt the need to do this
because I just value the human being
that was on the other side and what showed up was
just this reciprocation of like
that's who I want to do business with.
I want to do business with someone
who values me as a human being, not just a customer
and that's stuck with me my entire career selling Cutco
and I think has really served
and got me to where I am in my business.
So I would say that for anyone who's listening,
whether it be writing a thank you card to your customers
or something that allows them to connect with you
as a normal human being that they experience
you value them above just a sale,
your business will continue to grow
and you'll get that repeat retention that you want
because that's what we all want in every sales interaction
and it's so hard to get.
- That is a cool story.
I am just like...
I feel pain right now because when I was a Cutco rep,
like you were talking about 10% canceled, 5% canceled.
I think I only had two canceled orders ever,
but as you're telling a story I'm recalling
I would sit in the driveway.
I'd write a little card and I throw in three band-aids.
(laughs)
- Just in case they cut themselves.
- Yeah.
- That's cute.
- And stick it in the mailbox and and drive off.
And that was like just kind of a thing I did.
Now I never followed up,
(laughs)
but I'm just like oh crap,
like I got to get my act together
because I've I've seen the value of that
and I use reminding me of that practice.
And one thing that you mentioned was authenticity
and thank you graduation cards
and I always hate that concept
and I kind of refuse to do it.
Probably, my family's like whatever.
Like the obligatory.
Like you probably didn't get a thank you card
from our wedding because I just hate obligatory...
(laughs)
Because it's like this obligatory thing
that just feels so like...
I get them, it'll be Christmas and Charlie's cousins will
send the thank-you cards 'cause the family rule.
You can't play with the thing
until you write the thank you card.
Thank you for the mittens, love blah, blah, blah.
And I literally see them show up and I'm like meh.
- Right.
- And what I love about what you're saying is it's not
the obligatory thank you cards that matter.
It's the ones that actually are genuine
and like that means something
that are heartfelt gratitude that are the most impactful,
not the hey thanks for your business, Tasha.
Right?
I mean am I catching that right?
- Yeah and I think it's what I think kind of
not weirds people out, but has them be confused
about the Mr. Thank You project.
They're like ugh, thank you cards are such that
like obligatory thing you just...
I guess you just were more consistent at
doing that obligatory thing.
Which is like a way it can be done, right?
Like most things can be done without heart
and I think that rolls into you know,
I know one topic you wanted to talk about today was
leadership and how does this apply inside,
how does gratitude and appreciation and acknowledgement
fit inside of leadership?
And I'll share a story with this
and there's a great definition
that goes along with the word appreciate,
but here's how the story goes.
So I was out in Philadelphia
during the Mr. Thank You project, this was day three
and I go do this...
I'm with what's called the Front Row Dads community,
which is a group of entrepreneurial men
and we get together to learn how to become
better husbands to our wives and fathers to our children
all while running successful businesses
and it's an organization I care a lot about
and am pretty involved with.
So this is a very first event
and we all get together and we're in Philadelphia,
we have the via training and then we go to a bar/restaurant
for an evening together to enjoy and create fellowship.
Again, most of us had never met yet.
So we're getting there, we get to this restaurant
and there's about 40 of us and we walk in
and it's this really quiet bar/restaurant
and there was one waitress
and 40 of us guys come in with no reservation
and you could just see the look on the waitresses' face
and she was just like oh, y'all just ruined my night.
Like she was not expecting,
she's hoping maybe she can go home early
and suddenly 40 dudes showed up who are rowdy.
So she seats us in the back of the place,
at the back of the restaurant
and she could have been the crappiest, lamest,
most annoyed waitress ever
and we would have totally understood
because we came with no reservations,
she didn't have to give us great service,
but she chose to do it.
And she sucked it up
and whether she was annoyed in the beginning,
she really opened up to us,
and we had a great time cracking jokes together
and she took care for all of us.
One waitress took care of 40 guys.
She got all of our food correct,
she even had the cooks bring the food out
just so she could have help.
I mean she just went above and beyond.
And so as I was...
I had written four thank you cards for the day
and I had one more to write and her name was Shantae.
I said Shantae is my last one for the day.
So I sat down and I thought about okay,
well how do I appreciate this person?
How do you appreciate someone you don't even know?
It's kind of an interesting question, but when you think,
the word appreciate what I learned about it is
the root word is a-pret-ate,
which is Latin for to appraise
or to set the value of the thing.
So when you think of when you appraise something,
like you have a house, you want to sell it,
the first thing you do is you get an appraisal.
You hire professional to come in to say hey,
this property is worth this much.
Well, how do they do that?
They begin with a list of questions,
they begin by being curious about the property.
When was this built, is there any termite damage?
They have all these things that they look for
to discover and assign a value.
So when you think of the concept of appreciating somebody
like a human being it's about
bringing curiosity to who they are.
What are their values, what do they care about,
what do they deal with, what are their biggest goals?
What are their biggest challenges and struggles?
And so I brought that to this person
and I was like well what are their goals,
what do they care about, what are their struggles?
And I thought, it just came out and I said,
dear Shantae, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you
on behalf of the Front Row Dads community.
We're a group of entrepreneurial men who are here to
learn how to become better husbands to our wives
and fathers to our children
while running successful businesses
and tonight was really important
because it was all about fellowship.
It was by getting to know each other
and we know we came in with no reservation
and you could have given us crappy service
and we would have understood.
You could have been really annoyed
and we would have gotten it,
but instead you were amazing, you were gracious,
and you did a phenomenal job.
And I just wanted to thank you on behalf of everybody here
for who you are and the greatness that you brought
to our evening tonight.
Signed, John Israel.
And I wrote the card, I put it in the envelope,
and it's about almost two in the morning now
because we closed them out.
I walk over to Shantae, I hand her the card.
She accepts it awkwardly as most strangers do
when I hand them a thank you card
and I start to walk away and then I realize,
I need to go to the restroom.
So I kind of make a U-turn and I go back into the restaurant
to use the restroom before we leave
and as I come out Shantae is standing there,
waiting for me to come out of the bathroom.
And her head is kind of cocked to the side
and she runs at me and gives me the biggest bear hug
and says that is the best gift,
that is the best tip that I've ever been given.
And she puts me down, she picked me up,
it was good, good hug.
And we just stood there
and like looked at each other for a moment.
And it wasn't customer/server.
Again, it was human being and human being
just connecting with each other
and what I saw there was just how much
what people really want is
to be seen, valued, and understood.
And you don't even need to know somebody that deeply,
but if you're looking for it, you can find it.
So when you think about people inside of your organization
and they want the same thing.
It's easy as a sales leader to say,
we'll just muscle through it and you got this
and just push through and just call another person
to try and motivate them that way,
but there's something else to honoring the emotions
and the feelings and the life that they're going through.
And saying like hey, I get that it's really hard right now.
Like hey man, I just want to acknowledge you
for being on this call tonight
because you've got like two kids
and you guys just have so much going on
and on top of all that you still managed to
hit your numbers for this month
and gosh, that is amazing when you think about
what you've had to do for that.
So I just want to thank you for like all the effort
you put into what you're doing right now.
- Mm-hmm.
- Because it's easy to look at oh well,
they could have sold more or they didn't do this
and to look at those things and to point those out
and that's how most sales management leadership goes,
but when we flip it upside down
and just acknowledge what's so
and appreciate people for who they are
then that's when they want to keep showing up
and that's kind of where that client retention is
where if you're looking at employee retention
or down line retention is people go
where they're appreciated.
Because they don't have to show up anymore, like get that.
They don't have to keep showing up,
but because they do in spite of
everything going on in their life,
that's really valuable.
They don't have to do it but they do
and that's where the gift is
and when you can acknowledge that, people just feel good.
And even if they don't know why,
they just want to keep going where they feel good,
and as a leader that's one of things that we do is
we create a safe space for people to
feel comfortable being themselves
and bringing their best selves to where they are.
And a lot of people aren't trained to do that
upon themselves, we're always our biggest critics.
So you might be literally the only person
who breathes hope into their lives and believes in them
and if you do that, they might be with you forever.
And that's how I believe gratitude and appreciation
kind of apply inside of leadership.
- Well and it it also ties back
I think to what you said about trust earlier.
That so much about leadership is about trust
and it wasn't exactly in this conversation,
but when you build that human connection
and it increases trust, people stop asking what the cost is,
they'll just follow you.
- Totally.
- I mean do you think that,
I would think that applies to leadership,
not just sales too, right?
- Absolutely.
Yeah and there's also being in integrity
with that for yourself of knowing that
what you're leading people to is the right opportunity,
is a great opportunity.
Yeah and that's a big part of it.
- That's so good.
I'm glad I wore my sweatshirt, I keep getting chills.
(laughs)
Okay, skills, structure, logistics,
how do you craft a thank you card that isn't lame?
- Yeah, it's... how do you tell somebody I love you, right?
There's a lot of different ways
and I think that even what I might tell people right now is
you don't even have to do this via thank you card.
And that might throw people off a little bit
about what I'm up to and that's fine
because I think at the end of the day
all I want is for more of humanity to be seen and valued
for who they are with their greatest contributions
to the world.
So it when it comes to specifically on a thank you card,
I think what's important is,
kind of like I mentioned with that you know,
what is to appreciate is,
is to appraise and to set the value
and to look at people's goals, to look at their values,
to look at their challenges,
to look at what they go through,
and to become a good finder in what's so about them
and then to point those out
and acknowledge it in the letter.
And there's a kind of an old adage of
when you're writing a thank-you card
try to avoid using I, me, or my as often as possible
because then your thank-you card becomes about you.
Like I'm so grateful that this happened.
My business is so much better because of you.
I'm hitting my goals because of your...
when it becomes about you then it's like cool,
I'm glad I helped you.
But when it's like hey, I'm just trying to think of
an experience recently where it's like hey,
I'm so glad that we had the opportunity to meet at XYZ event
and you have a lot of places that you can put your money
and what you invest to support your business' growth
and the fact that you chose to invest with me is awesome
and I just wanna let you know how grateful I am
because I enjoy just meeting you
and the conversation we had about X, Y, & Z,
bring something specific so they know this isn't
what you write to everybody.
And I just want to let you know
that I really look forward to getting to see you again
and the next opportunity we can connect
because again, my goal is to have you as a client for life
so take care, god bless.
If you need anything, let me know.
Whatever, something simple like that.
So I think that the more you can reflect to people
and that was kind of more in a business side of
writing a thank you card.
And there's a lot of other ways of doing it
and I think that's one of the most powerful things
that I would say that I want people to take away from
the Mr. Thank You project is not just
in the business component,
but just finding the people in your life
that you feel deserve to be honored, valued, respected,
who maybe led you at some point in your life.
Might have been a mentor, a teacher, a parent, or whatever
and to take the time to appreciate and acknowledge them
and just to highlight like,
hey, back in 1997
when I was a high school senior and was really struggling,
I did this for my English teacher.
I was really struggling with with reading
and with my writing and you are
the person who inspired me to write.
Not because you were mean or you're a disciplinarian,
but because you loved writing and I felt that
when you were my teacher.
And I just wanted to thank you for that
because now I'm a writer
and I sent her a copy of my book
and I said, and I owe a lot of my desire
and love for literature now to you.
So I just wanted to thank you for that
and what you've inspired.
And there's not a formula to that as much
as it is just what you feel you want to say to somebody
that you've never said
and to allow for the vulnerability there
and it's really amazing on how you feel.
And it was actually pretty awesome,
I sent that letter off to my English teacher in high school
and she got it and we've actually
become great friends since then
and we've stayed in touch.
I've said to her actually both copies, I have two books now
and it's amazing how it creates
a deeper connection with people
that you maybe have lost connection with.
So yeah, I don't think that was as specific
as maybe you were wanting on the (laughs)
on the format, but those are my strategies on it.
- Don't worry that's my gift.
I wrote down step one, you could have done this.
Step two, but you did this instead.
Step three, I'm so grateful for meeting you.
Step four, blank impacted me.
And step five, looking forward to blank.
- Yeah and then something
and I don't know if this is a good thing to end on,
but on the concept of gratitude,
you actually pointed something out
that I think is important for everyone
to get on this concept of gratitude is
that the word gratitude,
the best definition I've heard of gratitude is
the emotion one feels when you receive a gift
or experience something as a gift.
And a gift is something that when you look at it
conceptually it's something that's given freely
without obligation or like desire to get anything back.
But that experience of something as a gift.
You can look at how somebody acted as a gift.
You can perceive it as like
he totally could have been a jerk,
you totally could have been...
by the way I wouldn't necessarily use that language.
You could have not given us great service, but you did.
And you're acknowledging that gift,
like even if they weren't conscious that they did that,
but the fact that you acknowledge it has them be like whoa.
Wow, yeah I did do that.
I didn't even think about that, but wow thank you
for acknowledging me for that
because most people are caught up in their own brains.
So I just wanted to point out that definition
because I think that's helpful for people
in this concept of understanding gratitude at a deeper level
and really what it means to acknowledge
and appreciate people.
- Yeah, I love that.
I know you have a meeting in a couple minutes
so tell us how, tell us about the mrthankyou.com,
how we can get involved,
I have seven since we landed from Hawaii
that I need to add to it.
- Awesome.
- So how does that work?
Tell us about the 74 million and mrthankyou.com
and how we get yeah, what should we do now?
- Sure, absolutely.
So mrthankyou.com is really the platform we've built
to track the gratitude that we inspire around the world
so the mission is to inspire 74 million thank you cards
written around the world
and so you can literally go to mrthankyou.com,
just create a user profile, it's free.
And then what you do is you just
put in the person's name you wrote a card to
and if you know their zip code,
you can put their zip code in,
and what it does is it actually tracks
all the gratitude that you've spread
and a gratitude map pops up
and it shows where all your thank you cards have been sent.
It's really cool.
We I mean, paid a developer to make this thing
and he's like I've never seen anything like this,
this is pretty cool.
And it also keeps track of every thank you card you send
so it gives you your personal number
so you've sent two cards or five cards or whatever
and the number keeps growing.
So we'd gamified it so you get a different badge
when you get five or 10 or 50 or 100.
And really we just want to help people
make gratitude a habit
and we'll send some emails out periodically of
just some inspirational stories of other Mr. Thank Yous
or Miss Thank Yous around the world
and what they've done and how they use the project
in their life or in their business.
So what I would kind of leave people with is,
is that there's a great guy that
I've kind of looked up to,
his name is Gary Keller.
He's the founder of Keller Williams Real Estate.
We do a lot of business with his company
and one of the things that he said was,
the thing that's interesting about my job is
it's about holding a big vision.
You have to have a big vision
that other people's visions can fit inside of.
And that's what his organization is for his people.
Now when I look at what is Mr. Thank You,
it's kind of the opposite almost
where our mission and our vision is
to fit inside of your vision
because your vision might be to grow a certain business
or to develop something and all we want to do is
support you to experience more gratitude,
more fulfillment, more love in your life,
in the process of doing that and build clients for life.
So we just want to be a mission
that fits inside of your mission with whatever you do.
So go to mrthankyou.com, create a profile,
submit the cards that you've written.
If you have any questions, you can reach out to me there
and the book, yeah, the book Mr. Thank You Project
just launched on Amazon.
So you can find that there
and if you have a team or anything
and you want to order bulk amounts of books,
we do a discount if you do more than 10.
Just email me directly or email my assistant
through the website and we'll take care of you,
but that's it.
- Awesome well, I know I need to let you go
since you have your appointment.
Thank you so much for your time today John
and it was great seeing you again.
- Thanks Tash.
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