It wouldn't be a shock to anyone if I said that MLM companies have earned a less-than perfect reputation. It's more than simple to find all sorts of stories from people who have joined a company with the promises of making tons of money while working from home and getting to spend much more time with their family. – And those stories typically end with this: Their “business” crashed head first into the ground. They'll shout to the heavens about the flawed system or the “scam” of MLM companies, saying all they're full of is empty promises and false hope. They'll tell you how they were shown all of these incredibly wealthy and successful people who made all sorts of money with their own business, and then speak of how their business couldn't even get off the ground.



One question we must ask ourselves is this: Has network marketing and MLM fairly earned this reputation? Is it really the business of the scam artists, all who are eagerly waiting for anyone who will come in and join them, only to fail? No, and it's irrational to think so. There is no argument in that the vast majority of people who start up their own home business quit at astoundingly common rates, but this doesn't have to be the case. This statistic says nothing of the failures and downfalls of the MLM system, it merely reveals that almost everyone who starts up their own home business is not ready and capable to do so.

Why don't we dig a little deeper, and apply some logic to the situation to see what is really going on? To do so, I'm first going to ask a question: If I took at random forty people who worked at average, normal day jobs and put them in charge of any kind of business that was their responsibility to run, do you think that business would immediately flourish? Of course not. The problem is they have what I like to call the “Follow the instructions” mindset, and most people have it. It has its own strengths – it creates very effective problem solvers, people who are able to, once given a direction or set end goal, find the most efficient way to achieve those ends. What it takes to start a business from the ground up, however, is an Entreprenuerial mindset, which is something completely different. In normal circumstance, people without an Entreprenuerial mindset don't tend to actually start their own businesses – it requires far too much risk and capital to do so. What we see is the people who don't immediately have what it takes are in a sense “weeded out,” whereas MLM is open to anyone at the cost of literally almost no capital whatsoever. We therefore see, in MLM, an increased amount of people trying to run a business who would not ordinarily have thought themselves capable.

What do you think happens to these people? Do you think they spontaneously experience a paradigm shift and know how to build a business from the ground up? No. MLM requires a completely different mindset altogether. A person has to be able to find direction when none is given, able to recognize achievement in all its forms. A “follow the instructions” mindset gives a person a path through a forest and enables them to widen it, smoothen it, make it look better, make it easier to travel, or make it more effective – an entrepreneurial mindset enables a person to actually cut the path. I can't tell you how many people I have seen who were so willing to work on their new business, who wanted more than anything to do something, anything, to make it grow. The only problem is, no one was giving them directions, there is no one delegating work to anyone in MLM. The result? Hard workers eventually quit, not because they are lazy, but because they just can't see what needs to be done, and if they do, they simply don't stick with it long enough.

So far we've recognized the two mindsets and what each of them are needed for. Maybe, however, you want to get started in MLM, and you've worked a 9 to 5 all your life. You've never had to run or create a business before. Does this mean you're not cut out for MLM? Certainly not. Notice I've been using the words “mindset” and “paradigm.” No person is born into this world knowing how to build a million dollar business – it's something they learn to acquire, it's a way of thinking that they are conditioned to. Anyone can change their mindset. It's a process of learning to look at things differently, change your perspective. The trick is that you have to condition yourself. It's something that goes against human nature – we like to look at things the way we are accustomed to, and we don't like change very much. It takes a lot of patience and perseverance, but if you stick with it, not only will it make you a much more capable business person, but it will also broaden your view of the world.

Let's talk about this mindset. I mentioned before persistence, and persistence is a key theme in the entrepreneurial mindset. It's something that comes naturally to some people, and others struggle with it – but do you want to know the simplest way to build persistence? Faith. Belief. Let me give you an example: Picture yourself on one end of a football field, and covering that field are thousands of upside-down paper cups. It's your job to overturn each cup, one by one, until you find the 2,000 dollars cash that's under one of them. You go about your task, turning each cup over and looking under it. If the money was a long way away from you, you'd have a long way to go and a lot of cups to overturn. Now, what do each of those cups represent to you? When you turn one over to find it empty, do you consider it a failure? No. You consider it progress. Each empty cup is you overturn is one cup behind you and puts you one cup closer to the prize. When you've overturned 200 cups, you don't spend your time lamenting over 200 wasted cups, 200 wasted opportunities – you're building yourself up, because you are 200 cups closer than where you started. Why? Because you have faith that the money is out there – there's not a question in your mind. You believe. This is a principle of entrepreneurialism I like to call it Progression. It's the mindset of recognizing progress based on faith. When I got started marketing, it was my job to call hundreds of people at a time to market a product to them. As you can imagine, 99% of them turned me down. I may have gone fifty or a hundred calls without a sale. I was telling this to my grandmother, and she looked at me and said, “That's disappointing, isn't it?” I looked right back and said “Gosh no. I know that one person is out there, so this means I'm one hundred calls closer to them.” When you start your own business, things are going to happen slowly, and you're going to have to be able to recognize the difference between failure and progression. Believe it or not, they appear to be very similar.

As I have already stated, the most important key to Progression is having faith. If you truly believe there is money underneath one of those cups, you will turn cups over until your face is blue. What would you do though if you didn't believe? What if you really had no idea if there were any form of prize beneath one of those cups? With each and every empty cup you found, you'd grow more and more worried, less and less positive. So how do you have that kind of faith? It's really quite a simple answer. You educate yourself. If you are well educated and informed upon what your current situation and opportunity is, and you know that what you have is a great situation to start a business in, you will have all the faith in the world in your own ability to create success. Get informed and enlightened on what to look for when you join a network marketing company. Finding the perfect opportunity not only will help your business grow rapidly, you will have endless confidence in it. Make sure to do your homework before starting a home business. Talk to different distributors from different companies, talk to customers of the products each company produces. Join a company that you have trust and faith in, and use rational, logical thought to analyze the very best opportunity.

One of the biggest things you need to make certain you avoid is what I call the “Vacuum of Normalcy.” Most people just call this the inability to think outside the box. This Vacuum of Normalcy is extraordinarily simple to get caught up in, and stems from limiting yourself to only one train of thought. Whenever something drastically new or ground-breaking emerges, I couldn't even count how many people thumb their nose up at it, never considering just how incredible it might prove to be. The internet is a perfect example. When the internet really shot out into the homes of average citizens, most people working their 9 to 5s didn't pay much heed to it. – The internet, they thought, was for computer geeks. They stayed “safe” in their vacuum, clinging to the familiar concepts of the work they'd always counted on. A select few didn't, though. They looked into their options and quickly took advantage of the amazing thing the internet brought their way. Take Ebay, for example. The thought of online auctions is nothing new nowadays, but someone initially took that idea and ran with it. – And I think we all know exactly how Ebay is doing now. I refer to the Vacuum of Normalcy as a vacuum because of two reasons: 1, it sucks people in and is very hard to break out of. People feel safe with familiarity, and that's a very hard habit to shake. And 2, it's a place of stagnant nature where new and innovative ideas are stifled and snuffed out.

MLM is an incredible opportunity. It can offer you a lifestyle that most would kill to have. The problem is that most people don't really understand how different it is from the standard 9 to 5, and they don't realize that, even though it's done cheaply and simply, it is still starting a business and requires the right kind of mindset. Network Marketing is no free ride. Like anything else worth having, it takes hard work and dedication, and you have to be willing to change the way you look at things. If you can stick with it, however, a truly amazing lifestyle is yours for the taking.