The Right Ingredients to Becoming an MLM Success

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.

But is this truly the case? Is MLM nothing but a pipe dream sold to the many that’s benching off of the successes of a few lucky people who were in the right place at the right time? No, that’s not the case at all. It’s true that there are a lot of people who start an MLM venture and eventually quit, but the problem doesn’t actually lie with the system. The numbers of failed MLM businesses points to the fact that most people who start them do so without properly preparing themselves, and are unaware of how different a work-at-home business is from a standard 9 to 5.

Let’s take a true look into the problem. Starting a business requires entrepreneurialism – no matter what kind of business it is. If you’re opening a vacuum cleaner store in your town, starting an online store, creating a service business, or starting your own MLM business, you have to have the right kind of mindset. Do you think most people have this mindset? Are most people ready to, at the drop of a hat, create a successful business form the ground up? No. Of course not. Most of us are conditioned with what I like to call the "Follow the Instructions" mindset. A person with this mindset can take any kind of instructions, whether they be specific or nothing more than a general direction, and figure out how to reach an end goal. This is a wonderful mindset if you want to work for someone, and can make you a very effective problem solver, but it’s not what it takes to start a business from scratch. Now, normally, the people with this "follow the instructions" mindset are weeded out when it comes to starting a business – they aren’t going to provide the capital it takes, for example, to start their own grocery chain. MLM is different, however – it requires little or no capital to get started, and so people enter into it with a mindset that will not be able to build a business.

And what do you think happens to your average guy when he starts his own business? Does he suddenly have this incredible epiphany, his mind suddenly filled with the vast knowledge and perfect mindset it takes to build his business into a success? No, of course not. A network marketing business takes a whole different mindset. A person has to be able to direct themselves, able to recognize accomplishments in every small action. A "follow the instructions" mindset gives the person everything they need to take a beautiful rosebush and trim the branches. – An entrepreneurial mindset enables a person to actually grow the bush. I have seen numerous people who are extremely willing to work at their business, who very much wanted to know all that they could do to make it grow. – The only thing standing in their way was the fact no one was giving them directions. No one was there baby-stepping them through their business. The outcome? These people who were very willing to work end up quitting, not because they are lazy people, but because they can’t see what has to be done, that they can’t be baby-stepped through it, and unfortunately they don’t stick with it long enough.

Let’s say, however, that you want to create your own business. The idea of working at home sound extremely liberating to you, and much preferred over your daily job. You’re a hard worker, and are willing to put forth the effort, but you have no idea where to begin. You’ve never started, or run, your own business before. Does this mean that you’re just out of luck, and MLM isn’t open to you? Absolutely not. It’s crucial to keep in mind the fact that none of us are born with any mindset at all – its something we develop over time in response to the conditioning we receive by our environment. Mindsets are dynamic things, and anyone can change theirs simply by actively conditioning themselves. You simply have to start looking at things differently. It’s something that can be very difficult. Human beings don’t very much like to change their outlook on things, instead preferring to shy away from change and finding rationalizations for our current mindsets. It’s much easier, for example, to blame a system like MLM for our failures when it is actually our own perspectives that are to blame. It requires a lot of diligence to change your attitude, but if you persevere, you’ll be a much wiser person.

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.

Finally, make certain you avoid what I like to call the "Vacuum of Normalcy." This is commonly referred to as "not thinking outside the box." The Vacuum of Normalcy is easy to get yourself stuck in, and is a result of only limiting yourself to one mindset, whatever you have been conditioned to. Whenever a new concept or idea emerges, there are always people who are caught in the vacuum and who don’t properly look at it and consider how useful it could be. Take the internet into account. When it was first introduced, most people who worked normal 9 to 5s just considered it some weird computer geek thing, and clung to the normal, safe concepts of work they had always been accustomed to. Some, however, didn’t – they looked into the internet and came up with ideas and thought about how they could make it work for them. Think about Ebay. It’s an extremely simple principle – online auctions. Someone came up with the idea of using the internet to hold auctions online. Last time I checked, they were doing pretty well. I call the Vacuum of Normalcy a vacuum for two reasons: 1, it pulls people in and is hard to escape. We feel safe with what we’ve always known, and it’s hard to overcome and work away from that. 2., it creates a stagnant, stale space where ideas and new concepts can’t breath.

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.