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The Real Reason They Don’t Return Your Phone Calls, And What To Do About It

Never again wait around for a phone call that might never come.

Mike Goldberg
3 min readMar 21, 2022
Photo by Thom Holmes on Unsplash

I’m going to give you a very important piece of advice, and the sooner you can accept it, the better off you will be.

People do what they want.

That’s it. It’s that simple.

How important are you to them?

Many years ago I had a female friend. We had a pretty good friendship, but for whatever reason, she seemed to forget to return my phone calls.

One day, I decided to test this. I wish I hadn’t.

As I hung out with one of our mutual friends, I called her, and as I expected, I got her voicemail. I then grabbed his phone and called her about a minute later, and she answered right away. I was hurt, but I had my answer.

Why was this happening?

The answer is, it didn’t matter. When you find yourself in a situation like this, understand something: people do what they want. You’re just not that important to them. Don’t wish it was different. Don’t get angry.

Accept it right away and move on.

The power dynamic

In friendship and in business — in any social interaction, you can either be subjected to people’s bullshit, or be on the other side of it. That’s the power dynamic. If you don’t let them string you along, you have the power.

If you find yourself wondering how a person can have so many grandparents mysteriously die in such a short period of time — whenever you want to make plans with them, I’m going to suggest you already know the answer.

But if you look at it from the perspective of people doing what they want, you’ll save yourself a lot of heartache. They call who they want to call. They hang out with who they want to hang out with. If it isn’t you, someone else is a bigger, better deal (BBD). And even though you may take it very personally, they don’t think twice about it. You’re not on their radar.

If you feel like you have to manipulate people to return your calls, you have to ask yourself if this is a…

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Mike Goldberg
Mike Goldberg

Written by Mike Goldberg

3x Top Writer | Traveler | Real estate investor | Storyteller | Occasional columnist | I talk about personal growth and seizing opportunities.

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