He sells training programs to networkers, like I do, and thought the post was too negative.

"Motivate people to do it," he wrote me, "and let the natural order of things weed them out..."

Motivate people to do it. (Buy the program, buy into the deal, etc.)

If that is someone's marketing goal, it would explain the uber-hype and big promises in the sales pitches for most self-help and mlm training programs, and for network marketing itself by its leaders and salespeople. You know...

"Want to recruit 8 out of 10 people?

"Find only hitters who will do $100,000 per year..."

"If I could show you a way to make $5,000-10,000/mo working 5-7 hours a week, would you be interested?"

"It's easy, anyone can do it."

"Everyone will want the product. It sells itself."

Etc...

These pitches have motivated plenty of people to buy into whatever's being offered.

Now, says my friend, marketing's goal must be to "motivate them to do it" because, how do we know who will succeed? Hey, we're giving everyone a chance at the American dream with [our mlm or training program], who are you do decide who will succeed or not?

So we should motivate them to buy the program or buy into the deal, and "let the natural order of things weed them out..."

And so the ticket-to-success sales go on.

He has a point. I know he does.

What bothers me is this: no one tells the buyers, sometimes giddy with hopes and dreams, the rules of the game or the probabilities of success, before they buy their tickets or before the game starts. Most pitches (and those marketing them) not only hide the truth, they make promises and offer up images that are patently false (product sells itself, recruit 8 out of 10, etc.) - to motivate them to buy in. Only much later, when it's too late and they're in knee deep or more, do they find out what they got into.

Is that a good thing?

There's a name for purposely keeping information back from those who don't know - sins of information...

"It is common," write the Freakonomics authors, "for one party to a transaction to have better information than another party." This is typically used to the disadvantage of the novice.

This situation leads to many crimes which the authors describe as "sins of information. Most of them involved an expert or a gang of experts, promoting false information or hiding true information..."

Do we really have to lead with half truths or worse?

Can you picture the caravans? Tens of thousands of folks in our field moving on, their tickets-to-success used up, mostly women, the losers in this game. Broke in spirit or pocketbook, they blame themselves. Because of course, they keep seeing those promises and hearing the rare big success story repeated over and over, so they've concluded "It must be me."

That seems wrong to me.

Am I too sensitive about our marketing rhetoric?

Or are we (who market 'tickets to success') just too chicken to ask for people who are up for a challenge - perhaps because there are fewer of them?

People who want to OVERCOME to achieve, who want to amount to something, who want to be somebody and learn how to survive the many obstacles, including discouragement and ridicule, that are bound to come on anyone's journey to finding (and doing) something meaningful in their lives?