“Oh, Harry”
WARNING: This will not be a fluffy cloud, ponies and princesses, hearts and stars post. If you are looking for a Happy Valentine’s Day article, you have come to the wrong place, so please do yourself a favor-click the Back button, and come back to this one tomorrow when your job is beating you up. This post is not written for you, it’s written for the WINNER INSIDE OF YOU.
No matter whether you build your business online or offline, you will face adversity in your business. Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but there is no way to sponsor 100 percent of the people you talk to, no matter how many slick marketing tactics you learn, and no matter how many training systems you belong to. Most of your team is going to quit, and most of the ones who do stay won’t duplicate what you do. Most of the distributors on your team will do 10% of what you do. The 80/20 rule holds so much weight because, for the most part, it’s fairly accurate. If the reality of these statements is what blows you out of network marketing, guess what? If not this, some other excuse would blow you out, so you might as well quit now and save the rest of your year. Go find a new job, maybe that will work this time.
Do I have your attention now? Good. Consider this article a mindset intervention-I’m doing this out of love, I really am. I want every person who gets involved in network marketing to achieve outrageous success, and I truly believe that any person on this planet can develop the skills necessary to do so. I also know that you don’t NEED everyone who joins your business to do it in order to build a lifestyle unlike any other. If you know what the numbers are, then you know what you need to do to make the numbers work to your advantage. But I would be an awful person if I sent you out into battle and didn’t let you know that bullets will come your way.
There will be setbacks, failures and hardships. No matter what they may be, only one thing will keep you moving forward: YOUR DREAM. You will never, ever, ever ever build a huge downline team if you don’t have an absolutely unshakable dream for your life and your business. When I say unshakable, here’s what I mean. Not only will you be willing to do anything it takes to accomplish your dream, you will be willing to do EVERYTHING legal, moral and ethical it takes to make your dream a reality. Most people get in network marketing with a hope or a wish, but they get blown out before they ever develop a dream.
How does that happen? Easy-along the way of building your business, whatever it is, you will run into the clan we affectionately refer to as “The Dream Stealers.” This could be your prospects. Trust me on this one, cold contacting people in the mall enough times that shoppers start to recognize you as the “Pyramid Scheme Guy,” and openly laugh at you can rattle the cage of the most courageous MLMer. Your friends and family could be part of the clan, either intentionally or unintentionally. Your dream stealer could be a person in your upline or downline who quits the race. The leader of your dream stealer tribe could even be the person you lay next to at night-talk about sleeping with the enemy!
If you’re an MLM vet, you know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. If you’re a newbie-stick around for a little bit, and you’ll know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. The point of this article is that your dream should be like air to you. Imagine if someone were trying to strangle you, or you were drowning in the ocean. You would fight with everything within you to make certain that you see your next breath of air, and THAT’s the intensity you need to have in order to be wildly successful at anything, but especially as an entrepreneur. The good news is this-if you get started and don’t quit, you build your business and you stay steady, there will come a point in time where you will have the microphone(and the big checks), and everyone will want to know what you have to say. Maybe you will handle the situation with grace and class, or maybe you will not change the names to protect the guilty-either way, that choice is yours.
My first venture into network marketing was with Quixtar(Amway), and I owe a great deal of who I am as a business owner to the training, support and leadership development materials which they provide. Regardless of what your opinion may be of the one person who ever prospected you about Amway, or the annoying cousin Billy who keeps calling you to join his team, the Amway business and its affiliated motivational organizations are responsible for producing a great deal of the success in network marketing today.
I was reading a blog by David Wood today, and he reminded me just how important it is to pay homage to the leaders who helped us get where we are, both personally and in our industry as a whole. I know that when my dream was in jeopardy, there was one CD I could always put in that kept me motoring down the road to one more meeting, one more presentation, one more training. “Oh, Harry” by Jim & Bev Mainor is one of the classic CD’s in the Amway motivational library, and I wanted to share it with you here. Click on this video, watch and listen, and really think about what your dream is:
Ready to go back out and do battle one more time? I thought you would be 
Make 2010 your year, and go get your Harry!
Please leave your comments on this post, as I’m interested to learn what your experiences have been with Amway, Quixtar, or just leadership training in general.
