“Fishing Didn’t Kill Daddy”

Two things affect your judgment; TRUTH and REALITY.

Most people think they’re the same thing. But they’re not. I’ll give you an example.

“The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.” True or False?
Answer: FALSE. I’ll explain.

If you get up tomorrow morning at sunrise and look for the sun, you’ll see it right where it always is, in the eastern sky. Then you can watch it move in an upward, westward motion. Come back this evening a little before sunset, and you can actually watch it disappear into the western horizon--- “setting”, if you will. This is REALITY. You can see it with your own eyes. But is it the TRUTH?

No.

The truth is that the sun doesn’t rise and fall at all. But from Earth, it looks like it does because you’re standing still on a round planet that’s tilted on its axis and rotating at about 60 miles an hour. The sun is still. YOU’RE moving. And that’s the truth.

But how do you tell somebody that they don’t see what they’re looking at? They don’t feel the earth moving under their feet; gravity is holding them in place. They look up and see the large round object moving from one place to the other. For them it’s for REAL, which is where we get the word “reality” (real-ity).

There is a saying among smart people, “the perception IS the reality”. The rest of us respond, “Say what? Don’t make this hard for us. Just tell us if it IS or ISN’T.”

But it’s not that simple. It’s either/or, or BOTH, depending on who you’re talking to and what you’re talking about. This is a puzzle that I try to solve in my work each day. Not in physics or in astronomy, but in MARKETING.

You see, I’m what’s called a NETWORK marketer, something that means different things to different people. Most people don’t know what it means at all. I get paid to do something that most people do for free.

If you buy something and like it, you naturally tell people. If they buy it too, you don’t make any money; you just have the satisfaction of sharing a good thing. I’m satisfied too, but I get paid for sharing. As a commission, I earn a portion of the sales made by my referrals. When somebody wants to learn how to do what I do, I can teach them. And when they make referrals that result in sales, they get paid, and I get paid some more.

HERE’S WHERE I FIGHT the truth/reality battle: some people think that what I do is bad, but it’s NOT. Like anything else, it CAN be done badly, but in and of itself, it’s good. The irony is, it pays more money than most people make who say that it’s bad! And I have more control of my time as well as my income. If it’s raining tomorrow, I don’t have to brave the elements; I can work at home and watch the rain from the window. I can run my business from anywhere in the country with a phone and an Internet connection.

I don’t have a job. I run a business of my own. The REALITY of that is scary. Reality says that 8 out of 10 businesses fail because they either don’t make enough money, or they mismanage the money they get. For me, the reality is that most network marketers fail because they either don’t make enough of those referrals, or the business that supports them goes under.

The TRUTH is that things can be done to prevent those failures. But most people who want to work for themselves won’t even try because the reality scares them so much.

“80% OF ALL BUSINESSES FAIL WITHIN 5 YEARS BECAUSE THEY EITHER RUN OUT OF MONEY, OR DON’T HAVE ENOUGH TO BEGIN WITH.”

Yikes!

Reality can sometimes make us irrational. But if we really want to do something, reality shouldn’t stop us. Let’s say someone likes fish and wants to go fishing. But they pick up the paper and the headline reads,

“80% OF ALL FISHERMEN DROWN EVERY 5 YEARS BECAUSE THEY EITHER DON’T KNOW HOW TO SWIM, OR DON’T HAVE A LIFE JACKET”.

If that were the reality, a lot of people would stop fishing, eating fish, or both. But that would be irrational, because fish is good. And so is fishing. The problem is in the part of the headline that reads,

“…because they either don’t know how to swim, or don’t have a life jacket.”

A lot of people would say,

“I don’t like fishing.”

Why? Do you ever go?

“No. I don’t even eat fish. Fish bad. Fishermen worse.”

I resent that, because I’m a fisherman and I love fish! What do you mean?

“Well, it’s nothing against you personally, it’s just that my daddy drowned while fishing. Just like most fishermen do. You read the papers.”

Oh. I’m sorry. Did he know how to swim?

“No, he didn’t.”

Was he wearing a life jacket?

“Well, no… he didn’t even own a life jacket. Said he didn’t need it. But fishin’ killed my daddy, and I’ll be damned if it’s gonna kill me too! I won’t even look at a fish!”

I’m sorry about Daddy. You must be devastated. But with all due respect, fishing didn’t kill Daddy. DROWNING DID.

You see, a lot more people could be successful in my kind of business, but they get into it without the skill and safety needed to survive. When reality screws them up, they blame the business. What’s worse, they keep other people from trying by telling them the reality.

That’s where I go to work. I tell people the TRUTH so they won’t be confused by REALITY. The truth is that I CAN HELP YOU make up to $150,000 or more, part-time over the next three years--- and give you what it takes to be safe and successful.

Reality is that you can work on jobs for 40 years and in the end have nothing but bills to show for it.

So… what’ll it be, TRUTH, or REALITY?

Are you in it for the long haul?

This is a question that I get from prospects more than any other.

Not, “is this a pyramid?” (It’s not. And thank God most people have enough MLM sense these days to know that much.)

No, people’s concerns are for something different. And at first it seems like an intelligent question. “How long have they been in business?” “Who’s in charge?” “How much experience do they have?” All directed at the biggest fear of MLMers everywhere:

“ARE THEY GOING TO GO OUT OF BUSINESS?”

Truth is, no legitimate MLM company starts with the intention of going out of business. Bottom line is they need one thing to keep going: a continuous flow of paying customers to buy whatever it is they’re selling. Anytime a real MLM goes under, one of two things happens:

They don’t have enough business to keep the company going, or
They get so much business that they can’t handle it.

Again, only a moron would start a company without planning to deal with either of the above. Money (or lack thereof) is at the root of both problems.

Neither one has anything to do with the distributor. Here’s my point:

NO COMPANY is worth more than the paper it’s written on. Not even Wal-Mart. Not even Microsoft. Because all a “Company” is legally is a few pieces of paper filed away in a drawer somewhere that nobody reads. And an MLM company is only as good as its ability to ship product and write good checks. If it can’t do those things, it’s no good to you. No matter where it is, who owns it, how much experience they have, or how good the products are. All those things matter, but the whole chain is only going to be as good as its weakest link.

The “company” is not bricks and mortar or articles of incorporation. It’s PEOPLE, PRODUCT, and PROFITS, and its ability to manage them. In MLM, “sales” is a company function; it’s our “job” as distributors to make them happen. PEOPLE are the only living thing in a company. Meaning, we as PEOPLE have control of the product and profits, not the other way around.

So, ask not what your company can do for you, ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR COMPANY.

You have the POWER to control your income. Decide what you want to be paid and make it happen with your company’s product and compensation plan. If you can’t, FIND ANOTHER COMPANY where you can get the job done. Simple as that. Once you have the ability to do MLM well, you won’t want to do anything else, and you can do it with any legitimate company.

The biggest asset you get from your MLM experience is your ASSOCIATION WITH PEOPLE. You make contacts that you can use for a lifetime. No need to worry about if a company folds. Work to build an association, NOT A “COMPANY”. Smart gamblers know, “you can’t beat the house”.

If you build an association with integrity, you don’t have to worry about losing a company. If my company were gone tomorrow, I could join another company the day after and within 1 year I’d be making a 6-figure income. Because there are people I can call to follow me who will run tell others. And they know that when I tell them something, they can take it to the bank.

How do you get people to follow you? Act with integrity. Focus on them and put them first; ahead of the company, ahead of the product, ahead of the comp plan and everything else. PEOPLE FIRST, PROFITS WILL FOLLOW.

The bad news is, if you’ve never made money in MLM, it’s because you’ve never had an association. The good news is, you can build one. Starting today. Tell people the truth. Always. Help them. Treat them like you want to be treated. Do that, and you’ll make money before you even realize you did it.

When asked the question, “are they in it for the long haul?”, my response:

Are you?
Are YOU in it for the long haul?

How To Make Money in MLM Compensation Plans

The FORMULA for MAKING MONEY IN MLM is so simple that most people miss it. The fact is it’s a numbers game. The results are in proportion to the number of IMPRESSIONS you make. You can have ZERO marketing skills and still make money if you make enough IMPRESSIONS. In baseball, if YOU were the worst hitter in the world, hitting against the world’s best pitcher, you could still hit the ball if you swung enough times. You could swing at every pitch with YOUR EYES CLOSED and still hit 1, 2, or more out of 1,000 pitches. That's the LAW OF AVERAGES. As your skills improve, you can hit more and increase your batting average. Some people will hit up to 300 or more out of 1,000. If you hit .300 in major league baseball, your salary is $4,000,000 or more.

Most of us make a few impressions on people who know us. If we get no results, we quit. But you need to impress a MINIMUM of 50 people to see RESULTS (people signing up in your downline). Too many of us quit before we impress enough people to be successful.

A monkey handing out flyers can get SOMEONE to sign up... but the KEY POINT is the QUANTITY of impressions. For the LAW OF AVERAGES to work, there have to be ENOUGH IMPRESSIONS.

You could have the worst, most expensive product in the worst company with the worst pay plan in network marketing, but the worst of everything plus IMPRESSIONS can build a downline with the LAW OF AVERAGES. A percentage of people contacted at the right place and the right time will participate. It’s the LAW OF AVERAGES combined with CAUSE AND EFFECT.
If you talk to 50 people THIS WEEK who DEFINITELY are looking for a way to make extra money, do you think some will join your MLM company? Sure! The time would probably be right for 1 to 10 of them. The best news is that some of them would copy your actions and build a business for themselves. So the idea is to impress AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE!